


all the subliminal things no one knows about you

by paperclipbitch



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Crack Treated Seriously, Crushes, F/M, M/M, Mild Gore, Mild Injuries, Multi, Not Incest, OT3, Polyamory, School Dances, Teenagers, Vampire Slayer(s), just assume everyone is a chaotic bisexual, not not incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25498870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: So, here they are, Luke and Leia, the Slayer and his twin sister, versus an entire town built on an actual hellmouth.Kind of.  It would probably actually be a whole lot easier if that was the truth.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker & Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Qi'ra/Han Solo
Comments: 25
Kudos: 100
Collections: Start Reading





	all the subliminal things no one knows about you

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Sucker_ by the Jonas Brothers, despite numerous attempts to find a better one] Copious ridiculous notes at the end.
> 
> I did a three sentence AU meme on my twitter a couple of months back, and [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/profile) asked for "Han/Luke/Leia, Buffyverse" and I did three sentences about Luke being the Slayer and Leia being his competent rock and Han also being there being Han, and anyway, I never really stopped thinking about it and then I spent multiple late nights writing, uh, this.
> 
> Thanks to [formerlydf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/profile), **celuran** and **hanelisar** for beta-ing, sorting out my horrifying late night punctuation, and telling me which bits needed more clarity. All other fuck-ups are very much my own. And thanks to my twitter feed for putting up with me yelling about #LukeTheVampireSlayer all the damn time.

Their origin story is, of course, a whole mess.

Well, Leia always refers to it as _their_ origin story, even though she’s actually a technicality in this, a footnote, whatever you want to call it, because one of the things about being a twin is that you get to claim at least half of your twin’s achievements and powers as your own. That’s just the rules. She might not be the goddamn _Chosen One_ or anything, but she’s still a part of all this, and that means Luke doesn’t get to hog this clusterfuck.

So: Luke and Leia were born, and then pretty much immediately separated, although not in a _Parent Trap_ way ( _“What the fuck’s a_ Parent Trap _way,”_ Han said the first time Leia tried to explain it all, because Han has never seen a movie that wasn’t R-rated) and grew up in entirely separate cities with no idea of each other’s existence. Leia was actually a pretty big fan of being an only child, not that it matters now. Things might have stayed that way forever, more or less, but then some poor kid neither of them ever met died, and Luke woke up one morning as the _Slayer_ : the one person in the whole world with the power to destroy the forces of darkness, eternally fated to save the helpless and hopefully tip the balance between good and evil, all the other shit that that implies. He was still reeling from all those revelations when the vampires tracked him down, slaughtered his aunt and uncle, and destroyed his family home. Luke’s Watcher, Obi-Wan, got him the hell out of town.

All this might have stayed a Luke-centric problem, but for reasons that may or may not have something to do with, you know, Fate, Leia’s dad decided to retire from politics in order to spend more time with his chronically ill wife, and thought that all of them would benefit from a move to a smaller town. Leia preferred life in the bigger cities, where she could wave her last name or her GPA and get internships in pretty much whoever’s office she wanted, but it’s not like she doesn’t see her mom quietly fading, and the pace of life is better for her here in Coruscant, so she sucks it up.

They could have been able to coexist without the truth coming out except that Obi-Wan, who is undercover as the world’s worst high school librarian, decided that telling them the truth would help Luke with his magical mystical quest, or at the very least prevent them making out at someone’s my-parents-are-out-of-town party. He didn’t specifically mention the latter, but it was heavily implied, anyway.

So, here they are, Luke and Leia, the Slayer and his twin sister, versus an entire town built on an actual hellmouth. 

Kind of. It would probably actually be a whole lot easier if that was the truth.

-

“I’m just saying, I saw her at The Cantina the other night and she was acting hella weird.”

Patrolling on a school night is never Leia’s favourite activity; she mostly wants to spend this time listening for noises graveyards aren’t supposed to have after dark and mentally reciting the chronology of the dates she’s going to need for tomorrow’s history pop quiz. Unfortunately for that plan, Lando’s her patrol partner tonight, and he never met a silence he couldn’t fill up. He’s talking about a girl he and Han know, and possibly both of them have slept with her, or neither of them have, but whatever, she’s acting weird and possibly dating a demon. That’s the gist of the rambling: Lando’s been talking for a good fifteen minutes at this point and Leia has largely tuned him out, letting the sound wash over her. 

Also, Lando has turned up for patrol in an actual _cape_. It’s impossible to take him seriously.

“She’s always been kind of a bitch, but that’s what I like about her, you know? Well, that and her eyebrows, I don’t know where she gets them shaped, she won’t tell me, but _damn_ her eyebrows are great. I mean, if she hadn’t always had them, I’d say she’s sold her soul for good eyebrows – I’m not saying I wouldn’t, if the opportunity arose, actually, they are _that_ perfect.”

Leia considers this for a moment, and sighs. Any good patrol is one you don’t come back dead from, but a _great_ patrol is one where you don’t have to wash dead vampire dust out of your hair when you get home. Tonight is shaping up to be great, but it’s also pretty boring.

“Did you have sex with her hoping she’d give you the name of her cosmetologist?” she asks, because while you should never encourage Lando, it’s starting to look like there’s going to be very little slayage and a lot of unproductive wandering for the rest of their night.

“She didn’t,” Lando mourns, and then adds quickly: “not that I, uh, necessarily had sex with her.” 

It turns out Leia’s found something that makes Lando go quiet after all; she relishes a minute or two of the hush before finally sighing and saying: “…because she was dating Han.”

“No!” Lando’s weirdly quick to deny that too; Leia files that away for thinking about later. “No, no, like, Qi’ra was… well, she’s Han’s, you know, _whatever_.”

Leia passionately misses last year, when she was on a debate team that made it to nationals, and she spoke to all sorts of teenagers from all over the country, and all of them could string grammatically-correct sentences together. Also no one tried to kill her and she was still an only child and she didn’t know the exact amount of upper-body strength it takes to drive a stake through a heart. Mostly she misses the grammar part.

There was a time when she thought Lando might be Han’s _whatever_ , although now she knows their history is way more complicated than that, too tangled and weird to separate, and a bunch of it is enmeshed with the beat-up piece-of-shit van that is Han’s pride and joy. Frankly, Leia’s got too many new relationships in her life to learn to navigate to focus too much on picking through other people’s.

“I take it she didn’t tell Han who her cosmetologist is either,” Leia offers, taking pity on whatever expression Lando is wearing at the moment, something that’s vaguely anguished and sheepish and earnest all in one uncomfortable-looking mouth twist.

“Han doesn’t know what a cosmetologist _is_ ,” Lando replies, “it’s why his face is so terrible. Just the worst face, really.”

Leia is reluctantly finding that she has a number of opinions on Han Solo’s face, and none of them specifically involve the word ‘ _worst_ ’, but she can see where Lando’s coming from, and it’s easier to hum a sound of agreement and laugh than it is to try and categorise something that’s not ready to even be acknowledged yet.

-

Under other circumstances, it would depress Leia that the student body doesn’t bother to use the school library, but Obi-Wan does go out of his way to be as useless as possible when it comes to finding books anyone asks for, and besides, they can all hang out there and discuss various supernatural activities without having to worry about eavesdroppers or kids looking for their English Lit assigned text.

Sitting cross-legged on one of the unused study tables, Amilyn has her eyes closed, a slight crease between her eyebrows, hands palm-up resting on her knees. Leia has actually been studying Latin for extra credit for a couple of years now, concentrating more on it now that she spends increasing amounts of time looking through dusty tomes written way back when people still wanted to record things impenetrably in a dead language. She can understand what Amilyn is saying, but she can’t help but envy the smooth way it rolls off her tongue, fluid and easy, like it naturally belongs there. Amilyn curls her fingers, bitten chipped electric blue nails pressing to the heels of her hands for a long moment, and then when she opens them again her posture relaxes.

“See?” she says, shaking her head and laughing.

When Amilyn walked into school this morning, her hair was a soft, cotton candy pink. It’s now a fluorescent fire truck red, both complementing and clashing horribly with the bright purple of her lipstick. 

“That’s so cool,” Luke says, leaning admiringly back in his chair. “Can you do me next? I’ve always wanted, like, bright blue.”

“I don’t know,” Amilyn admits, “I tried to do the cat last night, just temporarily, and now she’s this weird grey that won’t wash off but keeps leaving marks on the walls.” She grimaces.

“I did not give you those ancient books for cosmetic purposes,” Obi-Wan offers up, something like disapproval in his expression and tone, and Amilyn quickly clambers off the table. She actually got the magic books because she’s the only person, other than Obi-Wan, who has shown any aptitude for magic. Leia was secretly hoping that she’d turn out to be great, so then Luke would have the muscle and the reflexes and she’d have great power just by raising her hands. The arcane language wasn’t a problem at all, but the results were disappointingly definite: Leia is not a witch. In a pinch, she might be able to cast something small, but she won’t be a sorceress to stand alongside the _Slayer_. 

For the most part Leia is not a jealous person, fully aware of her own capabilities and happy with them, but some days she feels caught up in some universal administrative _bullshit_. 

“Do not get blue hair, kid,” Han offers up. He’s sprawled insouciantly in a chair, even though Leia would bet real actual money that he doesn’t know what ‘insouciant’ means, and they all stopped trying to figure out a while ago how he manages to get into a high school on a regular basis with no one asking difficult questions. Leia’s pretty sure he’s not living in his van this month: she’s carefully ignoring the possibility that he’s now sleeping somewhere in the library. Han’s existence involves lurching from one minor disaster to another, now with periodic vampire staking in between, although it’s entirely possible that his involvement in their little slayer operation is just another disaster of a scale yet to be determined. 

“If you’re going to do anything, you should go for a haircut that strikes terror into vampires,” Amilyn offers thoughtfully.

“Nothing’s going to do that to this baby face,” Leia remarks, leaning over to ruffle Luke’s golden hair, while he glares at her. They grew up as only children: they’re still getting used to the sibling dynamic, to getting to _have_ a sibling dynamic. 

“One of Luke’s greatest weapons is other people’s underestimation,” Obi-Wan intones.

They all sit there silently and think about that for a long moment.

“ _Damn_ ,” Han says appreciatively, “I hope I can throw shade like that when I’m old.”

Leia lasts about three seconds of pressing her lips together before the laughter explodes out of her, trying and failing to avoid a slayer-swift kick under the table.

-

There is exactly one club in Coruscant: The Cantina. There’s not really anywhere else to go, so pretty much everyone under the age of thirty ends up there at least one night a week. You go to school with a set of people all day, and then you run into them again in the evening: the jocks, the popular kids, the nerds, the theatre kids, and whatever label they’ve hung on their weird little group. It’s also where you can meet college kids, or not-college kids; Lando is basically Schrödinger’s college student at this point, because he claims that he’s found a loophole in the technicality that got him kicked out. Whether he has or not, he spends most of his time efficiently cheating at cards and wearing increasingly ridiculous ensembles that he must get online because Leia can’t think of any stores in town that would stock any of the clothes.

Tonight, he’s dancing in some obscenely well-cut jeans and a pair of discreetly sparkly boots that Leia frankly covets, all white teeth and laughter, which is why Lando gets all the good gossip about what’s going on in this town, supernatural and otherwise. It would be easy to go out there and dance – she’s wearing this dress for _something_ , anyway, even if she isn’t entirely sure what it is – and Lando would grin and drag her into his orbit and for five minutes she’d be a part of a crowd, something settled and fixed and whole. Leia’s never exactly fitted in and never really wanted to: she learned to smile for press cameras before she learned to walk, no matter how much her parents tried to shield her, and after that if her dad’s name didn’t scare people off her smart mind and smarter tongue did. She’s never really minded and isn’t about to start now, but sometimes she thinks it looks… well, peaceful, at least.

Amilyn pokes her cheek. “Whatever you’re brooding about, you’re starting to make Han look cheerful.”

Leia screws up her face. “I’m not brooding, I’m just distracted by Lando’s boots.”

“They are good,” Amilyn agrees. “I know Obi-Wan is being a buzzkill about using magic for accessorising, but honestly there’s so many spells, I’m pretty sure witches throughout the centuries have been vain bitches.”

This week, Amilyn’s hair is vague pale grey-ish that makes her blue eyes look huge, and she’s bound it up in an enormous bun on top of her head that should look ridiculous but which she’s carrying off with panache and a giant pair of metallic earrings. Since Amilyn has apparently been doing things like this to her hair for years, locked in her bathroom with peroxide and bottles of dye, no one’s called attention to the fact her hair keeps changing colour; though she says the magical way is much kinder to her roots. Leia let her do her hair for tonight and is pleased with the resultant looping crown of braids that’s much prettier and less eccentric than expected. 

Overall, Leia is wasting her hair and her dress and her cute heels on sitting here, nursing a soda she doesn’t particularly want to drink, while next to her Amilyn alternates between her teen wiccans WhatsApp group and reading pornographic fanfiction for a Netflix show Leia hasn’t watched. The characters seem remarkably flexible, anyway. Opposite her Han is picking the label off his beer bottle, sweeping a casual machine gun of a glower across everyone in the room. This is Han’s general state of existence in The Cantina, unless he’s specifically hitting on someone. He has a surprising rate of success for someone as scruffy and cocky as he is, and Leia hasn’t decided if she’s privately annoyed by this or not.

She could have spent tonight with Luke, who has extra training, but there’s only so many times she can watch Obi-Wan hit her brother with a quarterstaff before it gets kind of boring. They always make space for her in training: Leia may not have superstrength or insane reflexes, but she has steady hands and good aim and doesn’t panic in a crisis. Even before they moved here and she learned both how to stake a vampire and how to behead a demon, Leia’s parents had her in self-defence classes, and she’s more than capable of flipping an attacker a foot taller than her over her shoulders and then stamping the hell out of his groin. Once she’d demonstrated this, and stabbed a few stakes through some training dummies, Obi-Wan was more than happy to let her out on patrol. 

Leia could also have spent tonight in her room doing her homework and brushing up on her Latin and sending detailed emails to her old friends that omit most of the details of her new life here. That really would probably have been the most sensible way to spend the evening. 

Chewbacca drops into the seat beside Han, dumping two more beers on the table and then carefully putting some kind of acid green concoction carefully in front of Amilyn. There’s a cocktail umbrella in it. Leia didn’t think The Cantina actually _had_ cocktail umbrellas, and is duly impressed.

“What’s in that?” she asks, and Chewie shrugs.

From what Leia has gathered – Chewbacca is not a man of many words, though his shrugs are deceptively eloquent – Chewbacca is Han’s friend and also unofficial babysitter, a werewolf of the kind that doesn’t go out savaging people on full moons, and an actual adult who has a real job that none of them have discerned but which sometimes entails him having to wear a tie. He’s about seven feet tall, with overgrown hair and an enormous beard that render his actual features almost invisible, and is terrifying if you corner him in a fight, but he’s also maybe the kindest and sweetest person she’s ever met even if he doesn’t speak in full sentences. Neither he nor Han will admit how they met, but their relationship is oddly charming in a codependent kind of way. Leia’s pretty sure that without him Han would either be in jail or dead, or would at least have scurvy by now.

Han reaches for his beer, nodding an acknowledgement at Chewie, and continues glaring at nothing in particular. Leia watches Amilyn poking interestedly at her drink with a straw – are those maraschino cherries? Why are there maraschino cherries in there? – until she feels the hairs on the back of her neck prickling, and takes care to turn her head slowly.

A girl a couple of years older than Leia is watching her, half-obscured by dancing bodies, head tilted to one side. Even from the other side of a crowded room her gaze is piercing, and when she sees she’s gotten Leia’s attention she crooks a finger, beckons. Leia considers her options for a moment and then gets to her feet, ignoring the questioning sound Amilyn makes, and wends her way across the dancefloor, through the crush of people, until she reaches where the girl is leaning against a pillar and looking amused in the manner of someone who knows the secrets of every person in the club and is going to start taking shots when they cease to amuse her.

“Leia Organa,” she drawls. Her voice is musical, her accent English; Leia is surprised, and then thinks that she shouldn’t be. “The Chosen One’s twin; the Slayer that wasn’t.”

It’s a theory that no one can prove or disprove: that if Leia had been born fifteen minutes earlier, she’d be the older twin, and then the mystical legacy would have been hers. It makes her chest feel kind of tight to think about, and she and Luke have never discussed it, not once, since Obi-Wan mentioned it one night early on in their acquaintance. It’s not something she likes to have hanging over her, and she doesn’t like it on this woman’s delicately red-painted mouth either.

Leia takes in the woman, from her elegantly curled dark hair to her Louboutin stilettos – far too nice for The Cantina’s perpetually sticky floors – and then back up from the distractingly low neckline of her silk dress to the amused arch of her eyebrows.

“Qi’ra,” she hedges, because her father taught her how to keep a cool façade, and Lando taught her how to cheat at poker, and years of debate taught her how to use the evidence at hand to its best advantage.

Qi’ra’s face lights up with a smile that might very well be genuine; she’s very beautiful, and Leia finally understands completely what she and Lando didn’t exactly discuss last week. 

“Ah good,” Qi’ra says, “honestly, dear, you’ve saved me so much time, introductions are so _boring_.”

There’s something else about her, something other than the beauty and the calm confidence and the expensive clothing. It might be magic, or maybe Lando’s right and Qi’ra has some kind of in with a demon, but whatever it is, it makes Leia’s skin prickle. She suddenly feels very young, caught here with the dancefloor lights sparking off her white dress, a child snared in a situation she isn’t ready for.

…those aren’t Leia’s emotions, not really, and she blinks a couple of times because if Qi’ra has an aura that does _that_ then it doesn’t bear finding out what else she has.

“Did you want something?” Leia asks, braver than she feels, “because I might be in high school but you aren’t, and if you want to talk to Han he’s right over there.”

Something complicated and indefinable passes over Qi’ra’s expression at the mention of Han’s name, but it’s gone too fast for Leia to capture it, and maybe she imagined it, a trick of the shadows. Her eyes dart around the room, and then she leans in a little closer, voice dropped so low Leia can barely hear it over the pounding of the music.

“The Master is looking for your brother,” she says softly.

Leia has no idea what that means but her stomach clenches anyway. “He’s not exactly difficult to find,” she replies, “he’s registered at the school and everything.”

Qi’ra’s face is still set in its mask of cool mildly amused indifference, but her eyes are bright, still looking around. “Consider yourself warned,” she tells Leia, and, despite herself, Leia nods. After another quick glance at the dancefloor, Qi’ra leans in close to whisper, breath warm against Leia’s ear. “If anyone other than the Slayer asks, I said something unkind about how Han is still in love with me.”

She hates, _hates_ the way that makes her toes curl in her shoes, her fingers itch to clench into fists. “Why would you be telling me that?” she asks.

Qi’ra looks at Leia for a moment, expression unreadable again. “Why indeed,” she says, and leaves without looking back.

Amilyn is halfway through the weird green drink when Leia gets back to their table, and Lando is sprawled companionably across Chewbacca. The three of them do a pretty good job of pretending they haven’t been intently watching everything that Leia did once she left, and it’s easy enough to scoop up her bag, shake her head at Amilyn’s suggestion that she come with.

“I didn’t get her cosmetologist either,” she tells Lando, who sighs and shrugs: “I live in hope.”

Han won’t look at her, at all, not even once, and for a second Leia wonders who the teenager here is supposed to be anyway.

-

“The Master killed your father,” Obi-Wan says. He looks very tired, which could be because it’s after midnight, or because he’s spent the evening beating the crap out of Luke in the spirit of improvement, or because he doesn’t like talking about this. Maybe it’s all three.

Luke and Leia exchange looks. Even now, with the two of them together and the truth supposedly available in abundance, Obi-Wan has been reticent to talk about their biological parents. Leia had assumed the truth was either disappointingly mundane or massively gruesome, and even though she and Luke have spent hours researching the name “Skywalker” – it’s not exactly common – nothing at all came up. With hindsight, that was probably kind of suspicious.

“What kind of a name is ‘The Master’?” Luke asks at last.

They’re sitting in the school library even though it’s nearly two in the morning, because apparently they don’t have CCTV in this building or anything, and Obi-Wan has made them both tea and is pacing while his own cup steams and cools on the table opposite them. Leia has kicked off her heels and is wearing one of Luke’s sweaters over her dress, though she’s made a mental note to let Amilyn know that her hairstyle is still holding up. First period later today is going to be kind of a bitch, assuming Leia manages to sneak home, shower, and hopefully nap before she comes back to school again.

“He was calling himself ‘Darth Vader’ for a while,” Obi-Wan says, which isn’t exactly a helpful answer either, but his expression is simultaneously faraway and sad, and Leia refrains from commenting on this.

“Why would he be looking for Luke?” she asks instead, because Obi-Wan usually loves explaining things in excruciating detail, and maybe it’ll distract him from whatever is causing his face to look like that. 

“I don’t think he’s necessarily looking for _Luke_ ,” Obi-Wan says, suddenly coming back to himself in a flurry of movement, and he crosses to sit down and pick up his tea. “I assume he’s looking for the Slayer.”

Leia looks at Luke to see if he’s picked up on something there too, but he’s just looking at Obi-Wan expectantly so she doesn’t say anything aloud, just files it away to think about when she’s less tired.

“Does he want to kill me?” Luke asks. He’s wearing a slight frown of concern but overall he seems to be taking this news in stride, and Leia feels a sudden rush of affection for her brother, who is much braver than any seventeen-year-old should have to be.

Obi-Wan looks thoughtful, looking down at his tea for a pause that drags on slightly too long. “The Master wanted absolute control over life and death,” he tells them finally. “There were prophecies about him for a long time before he came into existence; when he finally rose he still managed to take us all by surprise.” He closes his eyes, and for a horrible moment, Leia thinks that he’s going to cry, or something equally awful. “I thought I’d killed him,” Obi-Wan sighs. “I _hoped_ I’d killed him. I presume he can tap into the Slayer’s powers and restore himself to full strength.”

He still isn’t looking at either of them, and Leia doesn’t know what to say. Most supernatural creatures of various kinds in this town target Luke: they want the kudos of killing the Slayer or they think that if they take Luke out the road to world domination will be entirely smooth or they can perform some kind of weird magical ritual with his body parts that will grant them whatever it is that they want. It’s macabre and low-key stressful, but it happens so often that they’ve all grown kind of blasé about it. It’s just a fact of everyday life: weird terrible creatures want Luke dead, and in the end, they stop them. The fact that this particular bad guy also killed their dad adds a slightly different vibe to the whole thing, though. Now, it’s personal.

Obi-Wan shakes his head, visibly pulls himself together. “You should both get some rest,” he says. “I’ll do some research, and I’m sure we’ll find a way to protect Luke and stop the Master properly this time.”

Leia doesn’t buy into his brisk, bright tone for a minute, but she’s not sure that she’s supposed to. Still, she obediently pushes her feet back into her shoes, and offers Luke a hand to his feet; he heals faster than a normal human does, but for the moment he’s still moving kind of gingerly.

“I’ll give you a ride,” he offers Leia. She nods, about to follow him to the parking lot, when something occurs to her and she tells him to bring the car around, she’ll catch up.

She steps back into the library where Obi-Wan is sitting staring into his empty mug with something like exhaustion and something like desolation all over him. He tries to smile for her when he looks up though, and Leia remembers that he hasn’t always been a gently grumpy Watcher trying to herd teenagers like they’re cats, that he used to have a whole life none of them know anything about.

“Leia,” he says.

“If the Master killed our father,” she begins, “then it means this isn’t the first time our family has come into contact with vampires.” She leaves the _and you didn’t tell us_ unsaid.

“No,” Obi-Wan agrees quietly.

“Did you know Luke was going to become the Slayer?” Leia asks, because she _has_ to, even for the flash of pain that crosses Obi-Wan’s face.

“No,” he says again, and sighs. “I wanted to protect you from your parents’ world, from their fates.”

“Is that why you sent us away?” It doesn’t hurt, not really: Leia wishes she’d had Luke for longer, for their childhood, but she wouldn’t give up her adopted parents and the life she’s had with them for anything. “Even though Luke might have turned out to be the Chosen One?”

“Honestly?” Obi-Wan offers her a tired smile. “I hoped never to see either one of you again.”

It stings, even though it shouldn’t, but Leia nods and scrapes up a smile in return because she understands. “Goodnight, Obi-Wan.”

“Goodnight, Leia,” he replies, and she leaves him sitting in the half-dark, staring at nothing.

-

Han, like most aspects of Leia’s life lately, was a complete accident.

The first couple of months in town were deeply surreal and accompanied by a vague sort of feeling that with hindsight Leia thinks might’ve actually been shock. She can’t be blamed: it’s weird enough moving away from the city you’ve lived in all your life to somewhere else entirely before you add in the long-lost twin thing or the forces of darkness thing. She was just getting used to a new school and a load of new people, starting to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with the lilac-haired girl in her Biology class, trying to stick to a curfew she’d never had when her father worked all hours of the day and night, and then: bam, she was attacked coming home from the library three weeks after arriving in Coruscant. 

Adrenaline had kicked in before Leia could really get scared: there were two guys, badly-dressed and snarling, and she’d been too distracted to immediately register their contorted vampire faces, elbowing one in the throat and stamping into the instep of the other. It would’ve been better if she’d been in boots and not her ballet flats, but Leia has never let her choice of footwear get in the way of beating up an idiot, and a sharp right hook broke one of their noses. If they’d just been regular human rapists she’d have gotten away with it, but vamps care a whole lot less about breathing, and it slowed them both down but didn’t stop them. Leia managed to flip the one behind her over onto the sidewalk, but felt something wrench in her shoulder as she did it, and decided at this point that running was the smartest plan.

It was annoying that she’d managed to live years in a big city with a pretty minor amount of being attacked by weirdos, but apparently this small town hadn’t gotten the memo that it was supposed to be safer and she was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to make it home before at least one of those guys got back up again and pursued her. Leia wasn’t familiar enough with the overall geography of Coruscant to know a shortcut or somewhere safe to go, and something like annoyance and something like panic was catching frustratingly in her lungs when an ancient silver van screeched around the corner behind her. She was caught in the headlights as the driver lurched onto the sidewalk and threw open the passenger door, yelling, “Get in!”

The night had already worn Leia’s nerves to shreds and she screamed back, “ _Why the fuck would I get in your murder van?_ ”

The lights made it impossible to see the driver in any sort of detail: all she could make out was a battered leather jacket and dark hair desperately in need of cutting.

“I’m at least fifty percent less murdery than those assholes, princess,” he protested, adding, “come _on_ ,” when Leia hesitated, balking at the nickname.

She looked back over her shoulder and, sure enough, the guys were back on their feet; one of them was limping, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t going to hold them back much, and she decided to ignore everything that society had ever taught her and get into the van with the strange man. His foot crashed into the accelerator before she even had the door closed and they lurched away from the kerb, Leia bracing herself against the dashboard because there wasn’t time to scrabble for a safety belt. 

“I’m going to be so mad if you murder me now,” she said breathlessly, and the driver laughed, accelerating down the road and straight through a red light. His face was cut into slices by the streetlights and Leia couldn’t get a read on him, but he was younger than she’d first assumed, and grinning in a way she simultaneously hated and… did not entirely hate.

“You look like you can take care of yourself, princess,” he said cheerfully, taking another corner on what Leia was pretty sure was two wheels, and she reassessed the level of danger she was in.

“Leia,” she corrected sharply, “and you can’t honestly tell me that moniker actually _works_ on girls.”

“Works all the time, babe,” he replied cheerfully, shifting to turn that grin fully on her. “It’ll probably start working on you, just give it another minute.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll have driven us into the side of a building in a minute,” Leia snapped, “eyes on the _road_ , oh my god.”

He twisted the steering wheel and somehow managed to avoid driving straight through a bus stop, bumping briefly onto the sidewalk again. Leia would’ve put her hands over her eyes if she hadn’t still been clinging to the dashboard, trying to avoid smashing her face into it.

“Don’t worry,” the driver told her, still worryingly calm, “the Falcon’s got you.”

“Are you referring to yourself in the disturbing third person or have you named your van?” Leia asked. “Actually, don’t tell me, I haven’t decided which would be worse.”

“Are you this bitchy with everyone who saves you?” he demanded.

“You haven’t saved me yet,” Leia pointed out, diving for the steering wheel as he turned to glare at her and a stoplight came alarmingly close to the windscreen. “Look, should _I_ drive?”

“Can you drive stick?” he asked, trying to elbow her away but at least managing to get them back on the straight road again.

“Can _you_?” Leia snapped.

“I’m wounded, princess,” he replied, taking a hand off the wheel to press it to his chest.

“Oh my god, _enough_ ,” Leia decided, because they’d probably put enough distance between them and her would-be attackers that she could risk it, and she wrenched open the door before she could second-guess herself or think about how fast they were going.

The guy managed to dive across the seat and drag her back inside before she could actually fall out, gasping: “what the _fuck_ , okay, okay, jeez, fuck, _Leia_ , okay. _Leia_.”

They sat in silence for about thirty seconds while Leia’s heart thudded against her ribs with stupid reckless adrenaline, and the driver kept his shaky hands on the wheel and his eyes ahead. And then he braked suddenly as two figures appeared apparently out of nowhere, right in the middle of the road, snarling and pissed and Leia had no idea how they’d moved that _fast_. Some kind of ancient sense inside her that identified as _prey_ lit up and told her she was going to die. She wanted to tell the man beside her to floor the accelerator, but she couldn’t, and he seemed equally frozen.

“Your name isn’t really ‘Falcon’, is it?” she asked faintly, as the two vampires grinned identical sharp-toothed grins and stalked toward the van.

“It’s Han,” he said, hands still on the wheel, knuckles visibly white even in the poor light.

“Well,” Leia said, “that’s something,” because all she could see was darkness in the eyes of their assailants, and if she was going to die, at least she wasn’t going to die in the company of a man who referred to himself as a bird of prey.

…and then that blond kid who was also new this semester but didn’t turn up to many classes appeared, wielding what appeared to be a giant stake of wood, white sweatshirt shining bright in the headlights, and shortly after that he was alone in the road, piles of dirty grey ash blowing around him. Leia thought that she was going to throw up or maybe faint or maybe scream, properly scream, and beside her Han was mumbling, _I am never going to be sober again, seriously, fuck this shit_. 

Leia scrambled out of the van, calling Luke’s name before he could leave, and then the school’s vastly unhelpful librarian was also there for some weird reason, and he and Luke took her back to the school library that was implausibly still open and made her drink a very sugary tea and cracked out a suspiciously well-equipped first aid kit, and Han tagged along, and by the end of the night Leia had gained a brother and a rudimentary understanding of the supernatural underworld and a whatever-the-hell Han is as well.

-

“I was doing some research last night and I’ve found a spell that’ll either form a kind of protective bubble around Luke or put him in a coma for fifty years,” Amilyn offers in the hall between Biology and Math. 

“At least I’ll get a good night’s sleep,” Luke muses. He’s not as cheerful as he’s pretending to be; Leia might still be learning the minutiae of her sibling, but she can read the tightness around his eyes, tucked into the corners of his mouth. 

“We could always track down some kind of handsome prince to kiss you and wake you up?” Amilyn suggests. “There’s actually a weird amount of spells that work like that, it turns out Disney wasn’t wrong about everything after all.”

“Unless you can manufacture a handsome prince with another spell, I don’t think there are that many around,” Leia says. 

“I guess Han could fill in in an emergency,” Amilyn remarks, and Leia scoffs, and Luke just looks kind of thoughtful.

Luke talks in fits and starts about his life before Coruscant, hesitant around his memories. He grew up in another small town, agriculture and tumbleweeds and a selection of underage drinking from how he tells it, not much to miss, but he had an aunt and uncle to raise him back there and here he just has an apartment he shares with Obi-Wan that Obi-Wan isn’t actually present in particularly often. Leia stays over sometimes, but more often she usually wakes up in the early hours of the morning to hear Luke tapping at her bedroom window, crawling inside post-patrol, smelling of grave dirt and gas station coffee. He started out sleeping on her floor, but they share the bed now; it wouldn’t be weird if they were five, and Leia doesn’t know if it’s weird with them being seventeen, having known each other less than a year and risking their lives on a daily basis.

They’re not public about the sibling thing. It would be too difficult to explain, their different last names and a selection of parental figures, none of them biological, between them. Leia assumes the school just thinks that they’re dating, if they think about them much at all, other than the cliché of Leia being top of every class and Luke skipping most of them. She and Amilyn between them can keep Luke from flunking, just about, while he tries to keep the student mortality rate down to less than three a month. 

What it all boils down to is that Luke has a history that is not like Leia’s: their lives have converged now, but they have come from different places and had vastly different experiences in them, and Leia doesn’t _know_ if Luke knows that Han is a fucking ridiculous _boy_ , with a terrible haircut and a symbiotic relationship with an ugly old van, and everything on his driver’s licence is a lie, up to and including the licence’s existence itself if his godawful driving technique is anything to go by. Sometimes she wonders if _she_ really knows this, and then what does it really matter anyway, for either of them.

“I guess I’ll look up protection spells that don’t end in Sleeping Beauty,” Amilyn says, passing Luke her textbook as it becomes immediately obvious that he doesn’t have his with him and slumping into her seat beside Leia.

“I’m not… completely averse to them involving kissing,” Luke remarks lightly, raising half-teasing eyebrows.

“Hey,” Leia says, “your face isn’t that unfortunate, I’m sure we don’t have to resort to magic to get you a date.”

“Ha,” Luke says, glaring.

“Love magic is actually very bad,” Amilyn remarks, in an airy casual voice that Leia doesn’t believe in for a second. “It’s technically dark magic and doesn’t really involve actual love at all, there are all kinds of unfortunate consequences.”

“But tricking randoms into kissing you with dubious fairytale spells is fine?” Luke checks.

“Apparently,” Amilyn shrugs. “Magic has no respect for consent. I guess that’s kind of the point of it, really.” She taps a silver-painted nail thoughtfully against the corner of her mouth for a moment, before twisting in her seat when their teacher calls the class to attention.

Leia doesn’t know what Luke did in his little town in the middle of nowhere for girlfriends or boyfriends or spin the bottle or whatever, in the days before magic and slaying and siblings and this complicated assortment of people they’ve found for themselves. Leia used to go on coffee-shop dates with boys she thought were cute and who she knew would respect her, who she could discuss TED talks and classic feminist literature with, and who expected nothing from her that she wasn’t prepared to give them. Those days aren’t that far away, but they feel it.

-

Qi’ra is not at The Cantina tonight.

“Why’d you want to see her anyway?” Lando asks, flung expansively across about three seats, nails painted a dark gold glitter that matches his loafers. “When you saw her last time she was… well, I don’t know what happened, it was unexpected and had a vaguely sapphic vibe.”

“Not that sapphic,” Amilyn puts in mildly, without looking up from her phone.

“It looked intense and bitchy, whatever,” Lando continues, waving a ring-encrusted hand. “She might actually punch you in the face this time.”

“Here’s hoping,” Leia says dryly, because while she’d like to tell the others that Qi’ra gave her a warning she’d like a little more clarification on, she hasn’t forgotten something paranoid and afraid in Qi’ra’s expression, the darting of her eyes. She’s not going to put Qi’ra in danger if she doesn’t have to.

“We tried to slide into her DMs,” Luke puts in, looking dorkily pleased at his own phrasing, “but she’s remarkably hard to find on social media.”

Lando narrows his eyes, and Leia spares a moment to wish that she could pull off gold winged eyeliner that well. “Wait,” he says, “is this some kind of… threeway thing.”

Luke chokes on his drink, and Leia watches Han’s throat bounce as he starts gulping his beer, and for a minute she almost gets a headache thinking about all of this.

“I thought you had literally everyone’s number,” she says, instead of even trying to engage. “Doesn’t it say something to that effect on those business cards you were handing out last month?”

They were on this glorious opalescent card stock, so gorgeous that Leia almost forgot that Lando is utterly ridiculous, despite the panache he nearly pulls it off with. His general brand is that while he isn’t in control of anything, he’s got a finger in pretty much every pie going and a few you didn’t even know about.

“Yeah,” Lando says, “but obviously I don’t have Qi’ra’s number. _No one_ has her number.”

Leia has the suspicion that her face will always be a little too wholesome for her to ever really pull off the _femme fatale_ vibe that Qi’ra exudes in spades, and for a moment she’s deeply disappointed by this.

“I bet you have Qi’ra’s number,” she tells Han.

He raises a confrontational eyebrow, the expression Leia’s learning he pulls out when he knows you’re sitting on a Royal Flush and all he’s got is a lousy Jack. “Yeah? How _much_ do you want to bet that, princess?”

Han only resorts to nicknames for her when he’s feeling cornered, so Leia refuses to rise to the bait: “If you text her, will she come here?”

He holds her gaze long enough to make far too many parts of her start fluttering, but she doesn’t blink, and eventually he turns back to his beer and grits out: “No. No, she won’t.”

“What happened with you guys, anyway?” Luke asks, because either he can’t feel how Han is radiating some kind of sour sharp emotion Leia can’t name, or he doesn’t care.

“She told me she needed a kidney transplant, then fenced mine on the black market and I woke up in Mexico missing three days and half my fucking liver too,” Han says immediately, without blinking.

“You actually have two kidneys and an intact liver,” Amilyn remarks, twirling her straw in a drink that seems to be mostly made up of lemon slices. When they all turn to look at her, she adds: “I know about everyone’s organs, just in case we need to cast some big spells.” She smiles at Han. “I mean, I’d ease up on the whisky brunches if you want to see thirty, but, you’re okay overall.”

“That does not feel like an adequate explanation,” Lando announces, drains his drink, and gets to his feet. “I’m going to go dance with people who aren’t sizing up my internal organs.”

“That’s what you think,” Amilyn calls after him, and settles back in her seat. “What?” she asks, noticing that they’re all still staring. “I keep telling you all that magic is really creepy and that’s why I’m not using witchcraft to fix all our problems.”

“Yeah,” Luke says slowly, “but then you talk about how great your hair is lately and it kind of distracts us, you know?”

“My hair _is_ really good lately,” Amilyn agrees peaceably, and Luke groans and covers his face with his hands.

“Will Qi’ra come here if I text her?” Leia asks Han quietly, shifting a little closer to him and watching his gaze bounce from the hem of her skirt to her face to the beer bottle he’s cradling in his hands.

“If Qi’ra wanted you to have her number you would have it,” he says. Leia waits a beat, then two, and then he sighs. “She’ll break your heart.”

Leia opens her mouth to tell him – what? That she’s not trying to date Qi’ra? That she’s sorry whatever happened between them happened? That she wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important? – something, anyway, when Han stands abruptly, dumping his empty bottle on their table and heading for the bar.

“Well,” Amilyn says into the space he’s left behind, “that was informative. Not productive, but informative just the same.”

Leia can’t exactly disagree, but she needs more information, at least the name of Qi’ra’s source, if she’s going to protect her brother from the man who murdered their father. She’s been doing all the research she can, but while she’s found a lot of old prophecies about the Master, there’s been very little more recent information, and she’s beginning to suspect there are gaps appearing in Obi-Wan’s book collection that weren’t there before. Leia refuses to be coddled about this, no matter whose feelings she has to tread on to get there.

“Maybe she’ll show up soon,” Luke offers, semi-hopeful, and Leia nods, but she isn’t convinced.

-

The first night Leia killed a vampire was also the first night she went to The Cantina. Luke, still nervous around her, still nervous around Han, still nervous around himself, had said he’d heard of vampire activity there, could she come with so he wasn’t just hanging around alone trying not to look suspicious. Han had said that The Cantina was a shithole that he wouldn’t be seen dead in, and that he’d come too.

Not sure if she was dressing for dancing or fighting, Leia had hedged on pants and stiletto heels of a height that made her dad flinch whenever she wore them, but he couldn’t comment because they’d been a gift from her mom. Although he’s never been the kind of father to announce _you’re not going out dressed like that_ or any of the clichés, Leia knows her dad would be fine with it if she just wore shapeless sacking for the rest of her life, but at least he doesn’t mention it too often. 

“Don’t forget you have a curfew,” he told her, but sent her out the door with a smile and a kiss to her cheek.

The Cantina was crowded and sticky and noisy and badly-lit in a way that had nothing to do with ambience, and Leia spotted half her classmates before she found Luke, who was scanning everyone around them with wide anxious eyes. Whether he was trying to spot vampires or just didn’t know how to handle a bunch of teenagers in skimpy clothing was a toss-up, really. Leia slid in beside him, noting where the oversized sweater he was wearing didn’t completely hide the stakes strapped to his belt, glad she’d rummaged in her jewellery box to dig out a cross her grandmother had given her years ago that she’d never worn. Even after Luke had saved her life the previous week, she still kind of felt like this was all going to turn out to be some kind of really elaborate hoax.

Despite Han’s opinions on The Cantina, it turned out all the bartenders knew him by name, and a decent number of the college-aged kids in the club eyed him in a familiar, if not especially friendly, way.

“‘Wouldn’t be seen dead’?” Leia teased him, when the third shifty-looking person in half an hour nodded to Han in a way that was possibly acknowledgement and possibly a threat. 

“Well,” Han said, waving expansively around them, “you can’t tell me the boys in the big city took you to places like this.”

“They didn’t take me vampire hunting either,” Leia replied, to avoid thinking about the people she’d left behind or the fact that Han had just made this sound like maybe the most screwed-up date ever.

“Don’t say this kid doesn’t know how to show a girl a good time,” Han said, flinging an arm around Luke’s shoulders, then hastily ducking when he glanced up and finally spotted the man Leia had been half-watching at the bar for the last minute or so. “Ah, _fuck_.”

“Oh,” Leia said dryly, “I wondered which of us that guy was making threatening gestures at.”

Han downed his beer, slammed the bottle onto the table, and, without looking away from the guy casually flipping a switchblade in one hand, said: “Can you run in those shoes or are they just for looking at?”

“I can,” Leia replied, because she had meticulously practiced until she could. 

“Good.” Han was still sort of crouched between Luke and the table itself, mouth crooked in its usual cocky half-smirk but strain showing around his eyes. “‘Cause we gotta go.”

“What about–” Luke began, but Han was already moving and he didn’t hesitate, and Leia slid out of her seat and followed them toward the fire exit. 

They made it to Han’s van – which he calls the Millennium Falcon because he’s ridiculous – only to find the tires had been let down, and it was less a random menacing man at the bar than it was an at least vaguely planned ambush. Leia could hear boots thudding on the asphalt, getting closer.

“I can’t slay normal people!” Luke hissed, panicked, hands reaching for the stakes at his hips and then flinching away again.

“Can you punch them?” Han demanded, visibly torn between getting into a defensive position and examining his van to see if they’d damaged it in any other way.

“I…” Luke hesitated. “I guess I can?”

“And I know you can take care of yourself, princess,” Han added, nodding to Leia.

“I do,” she agreed, sweet, “and if you call me that again, I’m keying your beloved Falcon when this is all over.”

Han was prevented from replying by the arrival on the scene of four people – three men and a woman. “Guys,” he said, with an expansive grin that didn’t work on Leia, but she could see how it _could_ work. “This is unnecessary.”

One of the guys – tall, dark, smirking, said: “don’t think you should’ve traded in the Big Guy for a jailbait twink and a-”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Leia interrupted.

“She’s cute,” the man said, directing the comment at Han.

Leia was smart enough to grit her teeth and keep her mouth shut, but she made a mental note that she was absolutely going to break the bastard’s nose if the opportunity arose. 

“There’s no need for this,” Han continued, quick and bright, standing his ground but visibly tap-dancing behind his eyes, something brittle in his expression. “I gave Jabba all his shit back, I don’t owe him anything anymore.” 

“You know that’s not how it works, Solo,” the woman said. She was tall and blonde, mean-eyed, like too many girls Leia had gone to high school with and rubbed up the wrong way. “Walking away isn’t that easy.”

“Of _course_ this is because you’re involved in something sketchy,” Leia sighed.

“Hey, I’m not involved anymore,” Han protested, “hence all this.” He waved his hand at the four people who had them cornered by the crippled Millennium Falcon, and in the split second Leia took her eyes off them in order to glare at Han, something shifted. Or, rather, their would-be assailants shifted, faces twisting into vampire masks.

“Holy fuck,” Han breathed.

“Oh,” Luke said. “That makes things, you know, much easier.”

Leia pulled her cross necklace out of her shirt, wishing that she’d come armed and hadn’t been relying on Luke to provide the weaponry and probably most of the fighting too. This was early days, after all, and she was new to vampire hunting. She’d never be so naïve now.

“You were working for _vampires_?” Luke demanded, pulling out a stake and planting his feet in a stance Leia recognised from seeing him train with Obi-Wan. “And you didn’t _notice_?”

“I was kind of busy at the time!” Han pointed out, ducking the first punch from the guy who’d been watching them in The Cantina and managing to give him a good blow to the stomach, sending him reeling back.

Luke ran straight at the vamps with his usual overwhelming enthusiasm, had the guy who hadn’t said anything yet staggering back and staked before anyone had time to register that it was happening. The spray of dust made the other two male vampires turn and make immediately for Luke, while the blonde snarled and leapt on Han. Leia wondered if she should be insulted that apparently no one saw her as a threat that needed taking out, but then Han was yelling _the bitch stabbed me!_ like that was somehow an unforeseen circumstance, staggering back with a hand clasped to his side, and Luke was flying back across the narrow street, crashing into a wall to land in a puddle of limbs that didn’t move again.

Leia is not the Slayer, is not magical or fated or prophesied, but she sometimes thinks that there’s something inside her that is more than just practice or instinct. Maybe it comes from Luke, maybe it’s her own, but it comes when she needs it, flowing through her.

She had three vamps, one unconscious Slayer, and a bleeding weaponless Han spitting insults and swear words between his teeth. Luke was too far away for Leia to run to him and get another stake, and one little silver pendant wouldn’t do much good. _Come on_ , she told her brain, flooded with panic and adrenaline, _come on, you’ve always been good at thinking on your feet_. And then she thought: _ah_.

It took a level of effort that made her shoulder sting to plunge the heel of her stiletto into the blonde vampire’s chest, hoping she’d gotten the angle right, remembering to drag her shoe back at the last minute so that it wouldn’t turn to dust along with the vampire. Leia was distantly aware of the coldness of the ground, but if the gritty asphalt hurt, she was too distracted to feel it; she knew that her bare feet wouldn’t have much effect if she tried to kick either of the remaining vamps, and instead ducked and elbowed one of them in the stomach to force him back.

“Han!” she yelled, and he gamely ran at the nearest guy, suckerpunching him and then dragging him backwards, shoulders forced back enough for Leia to stab her shoe into the vampire’s heart. It was easier the second time, the impact jarring up her arm but not enough to make her lose her grip on her shoe or stagger as Han’s arms were suddenly full of air and both of them were gagging on flying ash. The last vampire had apparently decided to make a break for it, and while Leia was sure that they were supposed to chase after him she wasn’t convinced they could catch him, with Han bleeding and her barefoot and Luke groggily trying to sit up.

Later, an unpleasant trip back to the library later, Luke lay on one of the tables with his head in Han’s lap and an ice pack over most of his face, while Leia struggled to stick butterfly bandages over the slash on Han’s ribcage and he periodically did some half-hearted shirtless leering at her when he remembered that that was the kind of thing he was supposed to be doing. Obi-Wan, instead of helping with the first aid fest, was pacing and lecturing them on recklessness and irresponsibility and other tautologies. 

“It was okay, Obi-Wan,” Luke said thickly from beneath the ice pack, “Leia was _incredible_.”

Leia allowed herself a smile, because she’d been feeling a little lost since learning that she had the Chosen One as an unexpected twin. Han reached and clumsily tucked a loose lock of hair behind Leia’s ear, smile a little crooked and much more honest than it had been all night.

“I’ll get you a new pair of shoes,” he offered her.

“No, you won’t,” Leia replied.

He laughed, and winced, but at least the bandages held. “No, I won’t.”

-

Jogging is probably Leia’s least favourite way to spend time, but she’s had to up her fitness levels since she started fighting vampires and demons and it’s less sedentary than, say, the chess club or debate club. While it’s occasionally fun to startle the jocks in gym class who expect her and Amilyn to be a brand of booksmart nerds who have no physical coordination, the level of generally working out and training is pretty gruelling nonetheless.

Leia can feel her hair starting to work its way out of the tight braids she put it in earlier, strands sticking to her face and neck. Amilyn, running beside her in an old Taylor Swift tour t-shirt, has matched today’s dark blue hair to the sweatbands around her wrists, and her face is flushed an angry blotched pink. On Leia’s other side, Luke doesn’t appear to have broken a sweat yet, his bright white t-shirt not yet hindered by the darker patches Leia is sure are spreading across hers. They are not joined by any of the others: Chewbacca has some sort of magical werewolf fitness going on, Lando never moves above the walking equivalent of a drawl if he can help it, and Han probably gets enough exercise trying to outrun the problems he has caused for himself, or something like that, anyway. Luke has a full backpack and weights tied around his ankles to help him train, but Leia and Amilyn are just sticking with trying to finish the run without collapsing or throwing up at any point. They can be fit, but they can’t reach Slayer levels of fitness. Luke will still be running long after the two of them have retired for showers and complaining and smoothies.

“Do we have any more news on the Master?” Amilyn manages, the words interspersed with panting.

“Define ‘news’,” Luke responds, managing to sound a lot less breathless. “I staked a bunch of vamps the other night who all claimed to want to take me to him, but they were all pretty useless, so I don’t think that they were actual minions or whatever.”

“Any luck with the spellbooks?” Leia asks Amilyn. If she concentrates on something other than the uncomfortable watery feeling in her calves, she can just about keep running.

“Nothing,” Amilyn replies, gloomy. “I mean, Obi-Wan only let me have the pretty tame ones, light magic, defensive stuff. There’s not much about prophesies and life and death magic or whatever.” She presses a hand against her ribs for a moment, grimacing. “I’ve reached out to my teen wiccan group but most of them are on a similar path, and, like, the minute you start looking into the dark magic forums they’re all full of white supremacists and weird guys who live in basements doing creepy experiments.”

“Maybe the Master is a weird guy living in a basement doing creepy experiments,” Luke muses.

“I did some etymological research and that other name, ‘Darth’, that’s a title that dark warlocks above a certain level take on,” Amilyn adds.

“What about ‘Vader’?” Luke asks.

“That means ‘father’ in Dutch,” Amilyn replies. “And sort of in German.”

“Huh,” Luke says.

“Freudian,” remarks Leia.

For a minute or two, as they pound along the sidewalk in various stages of breathlessness, Leia thinks there might be something tickling her brain, something she can’t reach for, a connection she should have made and can’t. The harder she tries to work out what it is, the further it slips away, and it vanishes entirely when a horn sounds and the Millennium Falcon lurches into view, managing to pull up to the kerb without crashing into a parking meter. Han is grinning from the driving seat, wearing a pair of the douchiest shades Leia has ever seen, while Chewie is looking peaceable in the passenger seat, eating an enormous ice cream cone that Leia immediately covets.

“Hey, unattractively sweaty high schoolers,” Han drawls easily.

“I’ll remind you of this one day when I’ve outrun a demon and you’re being devoured,” Amilyn says cheerfully. 

Leia notes that the Falcon’s wing mirror is currently held on with duct tape; for someone who loves his van like Han does, he sure doesn’t take care of it. “What happened there?” she asks, nodding at it.

“A truly great story that you won’t appreciate,” Han tells her, prim, and Chewie rolls his eyes. 

“Did Jabba send some more guys round with baseball bats again?” Luke asks.

They’re working their way through Jabba’s organisation, which seems to specialise in transportation of anything that you can put on the black market – human or supernatural – and employs pretty much indiscriminately with regard to species. That is basically the only point in its sort-of favour, though, and Luke and Obi-Wan are reasonably sure that demons aren’t supposed to be running their own mafias, so the part where they’re staking various middlemen is partially a favour to Han and partially just general Slayer business. 

“I staked ‘em this time,” Han says cheerfully, and Chewbacca lets out a low, sort-of growl. “Okay, and Chewie bit a couple of ‘em. Not in a transformation way!” he adds hastily. “But, you know, I can handle myself.”

Chewie calmly punctures Han’s smugness by leaning over, hooking a finger around the arm of Han’s sunglasses, and pulling them off to reveal a truly impressive black eye. 

“Sure,” Luke says, “you look handled.”

Leia fails to hide a laugh and Amilyn lets out a giggle, covering her mouth too late. Han scowls, snatching his shades back.

“Laugh it up, kids,” he snips, throwing the Falcon into reverse with a crunching of gears that makes Leia flinch. Chewie grimaces at them before turning his attention back to his ice cream, and the van screams off.

“That means this is over now, right?” Amilyn asks, wiping one of her sweatbands across her forehead. 

“I was gonna get another couple of miles in,” Luke shrugs, because he now has supernatural jogging powers or something that isn’t specifically mentioned in the Slayer literature.

Leia struggles with her pride for a moment, then sighs and says, “Well, you have fun with that. I’m going for a shower and then I guess I’ll go back to scouring ancient Latin texts for a brief reference to a magic vampire who killed our dad.”

“Love our hobbies,” Amilyn remarks, as Luke tosses them a salute and runs off, all shiny bouncy hair and perfect pacing. She turns to Leia and makes a face. “Wanna carry me home? I can’t feel my legs.”

“I can’t feel mine either,” Leia replies, “you’re on your own.”

-

A week or so later finds Luke, Leia and Han at The Cantina together. It’s a Wednesday night, so the place is hardly buzzing; Leia sips a poorly-made cappuccino and half-listens to a band of high school juniors covering Taylor Swift not _entirely_ badly, while Luke and Han cheerfully bicker about something that may or may not have happened on patrol last Tuesday. She’s not used to it just being them these days; it was their general state for their first few months in Coruscant, and then Han introduced them to Chewbacca ( _“your BFF’s a_ werewolf _, but you didn’t believe in vampires until they nearly killed you?!”_ ) and Leia progressed from occasional study dates with Amilyn to actual friendship, and Lando got back into town and resumed his position as Han’s… whatever he is, and their little group expanded. But Chewie is working tonight and Lando is off doing his Lando things and Amilyn is working on a biology project with her lab partner, and suddenly Leia is sitting here with her brother on one side and Han on the other and she thinks she’s maybe forgotten how to do all this properly without a buffer.

“Still no Qi’ra,” Luke remarks to Leia, snapping her out of her thoughts.

“No,” she agrees. She’s beginning to suspect that that was it: one thin warning that put them on their guard but equally didn’t provide them with anything concrete to go on. “I’m not sure she’s coming back any time soon.”

“What did she _say_ to you anyway?” Han sounds grouchy, which is possibly reasonable, Leia can’t even tell anymore.

“Something unkind about how you’re still in love with her,” Leia recites without really thinking about it, draining the unsatisfying dregs of her coffee. 

For a brief second Han looks slapped, and then he gets control over his expression again and he’s back to his usual mixture of cockiness and irritation that he pulls off way better than Leia would really like. 

“You can’t believe any of the shit she says,” he tells them, but it sounds more automatic than anything else.

“ _Are_ you?” Luke asks, propping his chin on his hand.

“You kids are awful, I don’t know why I hang out with you,” Han says, without any real venom, and disappears off to the bar.

Figures.

Luke waits until he’s gone before knocking his knee against Leia’s and saying, “You okay?”

“Sure,” Leia replies, wishing she still had the shitty coffee so she could have something to do with her hands. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Luke screws up his face. “You’ve been weird for a couple of days. Kind of distracted and snappy? It’s not really like you, and I checked with Amilyn and it’s not a _girl_ thing, and your mom’s doing well and none of us have been cursed by demons lately, so, what gives?”

Leia reminds herself that nothing is Luke’s fault, and can’t stop herself from retorting, “Oh, sorry, do you want me to provide you with a calendar of my menstrual cycle so you can discern whether my emotions are valid or not?”

Han has reappeared at this point; “Fuck,” he says easily as he drops back into his seat.

Luke is looking kind of confused and kind of hurt and still suspicious, and all of a sudden Leia has a headache just from _existing_.

“I’m going to get some air,” she says, and is relieved when neither of the boys try to follow her outside.

It’s a crisp night, quiet and cool without being cold, and Leia shoves hands that are trembling a little into the pockets of her jeans. What she needs to do, really, is talk to Obi-Wan about the gaps in the history of Darth Vader, the Master, whoever: they get bigger the more Leia tries to look into them, and he’s getting more evasive the more questions they ask him.

Later, Leia will be angry about her listlessness, how she allowed herself to be so distracted that it was easy for someone to sneak up behind her and knock her unconscious before she was even aware of them, before she could scream.

She doesn’t know how much later she wakes up, except that she’s woozy and nauseous and her head is _thudding_ and her vision keeps blurring in and out, and some still-rational part of her brain diagnoses concussion. When she tries to move, she finds her wrists are chained above her head and she’s lolling against a rocky wall, mercifully sitting down because she doesn’t think her legs could hold her right now.

“Leia?” She turns her head too quickly, has to close her eyes and count to three before she can breathe and open them again, and finds that Luke is sprawled a few feet away, equally chained. There’s dried blood under his nose and wet blood at his temple, and Leia can see a handful of cuts through his half-shredded t-shirt. 

“Luke!” Leia tugs at her chains but obviously they don’t give, and her stomach is twisting at the sight of her brother slumped in his bonds, bloody and exhausted. “Where are we?”

“Fucking nowhere good,” comes the voice from her other side, and she turns a little more carefully to see Han chained on her other side. He looks less bad than Luke, but there’s a nasty bruise spreading across most of his jaw and she notes he’s trying to keep his weight from pulling at his left shoulder. 

“Please tell me I wasn’t some kind of bait,” she says, which is possibly not the priority right now, but still matters.

Han laughs until it turns into a cough halfway through; he spits a wad of what looks suspiciously like blood and says, “Don’t worry, princess, we didn’t even know you needed rescuing when they took us.”

“There were so many of them,” Luke mumbles, sounding flat and tired. “I got a few but… they just kept coming.” They’re silent for a moment, until Han says: “so, what do we think? Demonic sacrifice? Vampiric feast? Unexpectedly human cult?”

“It’s the Master, isn’t it,” Luke says, flat. 

“I think so, yes,” Leia agrees. Every time someone speaks it feels like they’re directly kicking her skull, and she hopes that it feels worse than it is.

“Master of what?” Han demands. 

“Nothing,” Leia says, as Luke replies, “Everything.” When he doesn’t add anything else, Leia adds, “He’s a powerful vampire warlock who’s been looking for Luke.”

“I can’t believe I have to know weird amounts of details about your classes and which kids you hate are dating other kids you hate, and you guys didn’t give me a heads-up about this,” Han says, and his chains rattle as he tries and fails to find a way to express his annoyance. “What the fuck.”

“We were trying to protect your ex,” Luke protests.

“Well, this just keeps getting better and better,” Han snaps. “What else are you withholding?” 

Leia has a tangled thought about telling him, but then a door on the opposite end of the… cavern opens, and a man walks in.

He’s tall and dressed in dark robes that he pulls off in a fairly impressive way, and lowers his hood when he’s standing in front of them. His features are briefly blurred and then come into sharp focus; Leia is pretty sure it’s a glamour, not her head injury, because she can _taste_ the magic roiling off him. He has dark wavy hair that falls around his shoulders and decent bone structure, deep yellow eyes and a healed scar running down the side of his face that gives him an oddly dashing look. He appears to maybe be in his mid-twenties, and his expression is one of satisfaction as he gazes down at the three of them.

“Well,” he says, steady, sonorous, stopping in front of Luke, “I have found you.”

Leia swallows down her nausea and raises her chin as high as she can; when she speaks, she makes sure her voice comes out clearly. “Hi, dad.”

It’s actually almost comical how all three men freeze momentarily, then slowly turn to look at her and, in jumbled unison, demand, “ _What?_ ”

-

Okay, freeze-frame, record-scratch, whatever: it took a long time, but Leia’s research finally yielded some results. 

With Obi-Wan being increasingly shifty and hiding it behind a wall of faux wisdom and the library’s shelves yielding nothing helpful about the Master, Leia decided to use the information she actually had and approach the topic laterally instead. If the Master killed her father, then he had to be active and around and killing people within a window of less than nine months before she and Luke were born. And if he was such a big deal, then he would have had to have attracted the interest of the Watchers Council, and the Slayer. With that in mind, she waited until Obi-Wan was distracted training Luke, snuck into his office, and stole the journal of a past Watcher that looked like it contained the closest dates.

Watchers have been keeping records of Slayers for centuries, and the Council has never really embraced digitising things. Obi-Wan carries around either the original journals or good facsimiles of them, and refers to them periodically. The rest of them aren’t supposed to touch them, but the majority of the histories are in ancient dead languages or code, so they weren’t as well-guarded as Leia was expecting them to be.

It took three days, a plethora of skipped classes, and Amilyn writing a history paper for her, but Leia finally cracked the diary’s code and started rummaging through the entries, looking for a promising word or two that would make the rest of an entry worth decoding. 

She found out a lot more than she’d been bargaining for.

It took her a while to put the story together, but the simple version that she eventually gleaned was this: a fourteen-year-old Slayer was activated, and her name was Padmé Amidala. Her Watcher, Qui-Gon Jinn, had been mentoring a number of future Watchers when he was called into service and, as the years passed and Padmé matured into an apparently exemplary Slayer, he began to bring some of his former students to work alongside her. (At this point, three a.m. with a full jug of filter coffee beside her, Leia muttered _oh shit_ aloud, because while Qui-Gon may not have seen where this was going, she immediately could.) One of these future Watchers was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Another, a little younger than him, was called Anakin Skywalker.

It seems that Qui-Gon hoped that something like this might become the norm, future Watchers getting to experience actual life with a Slayer before they had their own, because he detailed a reasonable amount of the lives of his little group. He was clearly not as observant as he thought, because Leia was just reading a selection of sentences from months of entries for context, and she could see the event coming that entirely blindsided Qui-Gon: Padmé and Anakin, still teenagers, got married. But shortly after that, Anakin’s mother was murdered by vampires, and Qui-Gon noted a growing paranoia in him, an increase in his use of magic, and a fascination with the legends of an ancient warlock demon calling himself The Emperor, who was supposed to be able to bring the dead back to life.

By the time a troubled Qui-Gon recorded that Padmé was pregnant, Leia was uncomfortably suspicious that she’d worked out what Obi-Wan had been avoiding telling them. She’d considered scooping up the journal and storming to the library to confront him, but instead she’d just kept reading.

As Padmé’s pregnancy progressed, Anakin became increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with protecting his wife and unborn child, searching for a way to keep their family intact, alive, forever. Qui-Gon finally realised that Anakin had been breaking into the archives of the Watchers Council and helping himself to a number of dangerous artefacts, and had stolen books of magic deemed too destructive for anyone to utilise. Uncomfortable and increasingly afraid, he’d concluded that he needed to confront his apprentice.

Leia turned the page and found a neatly typed notice, pasted into the book by someone in administration, informing her that Qui-Gon Jinn had died in service mere hours after he’d written his final entry. Shaken, she’d pulled herself together and gone back to the library, intending to find the journal of whoever had taken over as Watcher next, only to discover that the diary was missing from Obi-Wan’s collection. Frustrated, and not sure she was ready to demand answers from him yet, Leia had turned to the only other place she could think of: the incredibly basic and frustrating Watchers Council website, which has a simple and bland timeline of Slayers and their greatest adversaries that is of no real help to anyone. What that told her was that a warlock called Darth Vader led a demonstration of his power days after Qui-Gonn Jinn died, killing many members of the Council and the future Watchers. Within days, some kind of unspecified trauma had led the Slayer to go into premature labour and she had died. And not long after that, Darth Vader had been confronted and apparently defeated by Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

There was no reference anywhere to Anakin Skywalker.

He _could_ , Leia told herself, he _could_ have been one of the young future Watchers murdered by Darth Vader. This wasn’t a detailed account, and she didn’t have access to anything else from the Council’s records. They were thorough, someone would have the specifics of everyone’s deaths: Qui-Gon’s, and Padmé’s, and Anakin’s. It would turn out that this man – who the Council seemed to take perverse pleasure in _not_ calling ‘the Master’ – would be someone else entirely, some other dangerous weirdo who’d called up this Emperor demon guy and made a stupid stupid pact.

But she hadn’t confronted Obi-Wan, and she hadn’t told Luke what she’d learned, and she’d sat on it for two of maybe the worst days of her life. 

And now they’re here: underground cavern, injuries, chains, and Leia didn’t even realise until this second just how _badly_ she wanted to be wrong.

-

The man formerly known as Anakin Skywalker is pacing and trying not to look like he’s pacing, like he’s just the kind of vampire warlock who takes slow steps back and forth across a small area as part of a whole menacing routine. There’s a tightness in his mouth that reminds Leia a little of the way Luke looks when he’s struggling with his homework, and she hates herself for noticing that, hates it for existing in general. Luke himself is crying without noticing that he’s crying, and he won’t look at her.

“I thought we’d have more _time_ ,” Leia pleads for about the fifth time in as many minutes, “I was looking for the right moment!”

“Not sure there ever _is_ a right moment for, ‘Hey, the guy who murdered our dad _is_ our dad’,” Han says. When Leia manages to turn and glare at him, he adds, “I’m helping!”

“You’re not,” she replies, but then there isn’t really anything at this point that _can_ help.

The Master has stopped and is looking between Luke and Leia again, the glamour shielding his features wavering for a moment. Leia isn’t sure what she sees underneath it, but it doesn’t help with her nausea. 

“If you’d cared about your wife you’d’ve gone to the scans with her instead of sulking and reading old spellbooks,” Leia tells him angrily, because it’s not like this can get any _worse_ , “and then you would know that she was expecting twins!”

She’s not expecting an odd, rueful sort of smile to twist the Master’s face. 

“You look like Padmé when you’re angry,” he remarks.

That takes the breath out of her and, from his expression, out of Luke too.

“For something so weird and creepy, this is sort of touching,” Han remarks. When the Master turns to look at him, he adds,“Oh, I’m not related to you. I’m just… also here.”

He gets a long stare from those dark yellow eyes, and for a moment Leia is terrified they’re going to have a _kill the spare_ sort of situation, but then the Master shakes his head slightly and dismisses him, turning back to Luke. Leia has the feeling there’s a lot going on behind that magically-generated mask, that there’s some kind of spanner in his works. She savagely hopes that that’s the case, anyway. 

“Do you want to tell Luke he looks like our mom when he cries, too?” Leia demands, because Luke is silent and there’s something in his eyes that she _hates_ and while almost everyone who caused this clusterfuck is dead, she could have found the words to tell Luke earlier, not let him find out in the worst possible way.

“Be _quiet_ ,” the Master snaps, waving a hand, and Leia feels her skull slam back against the rock. Han and Luke both cry out but she doesn’t make a sound, can’t breathe for a long moment. When she raises her head again, she stays silent.

Luke looks up at their – for want of a _much_ better word – father, face tearstained and bloody and defiant, and Leia’s heart lurches. Part of her thinks that this might be the last expression she ever sees him wear, and she’s so proud of him it makes her chest hurt. 

“Obi-Wan did not kill me,” the Master says, quiet. “He could have, but he let his rage and his grief blind him, and I survived his attack. Barely, but it was enough.”

Leia waits for a sarcastic comment from Han, but nothing comes. She wonders if he’s still conscious, but she’s too dizzy to be able to check.

Luke sniffs, but his glower stays in place. “What, did you want us to give you a gold star?”

“The Emperor saved me by having me turned into a vampire,” the Master continues, ignoring him. “He told me that I could be restored to my full abilities by taking the strength from a Slayer.”

Even though Leia suspected that something like this was coming, the words are still a gut-punch. Han’s chains rattle again like he’s struggling with them; Luke stays still and just stares up at the Master.

“Then what are you waiting for,” he says.

There’s a breathless moment and then the Master takes a step backwards.

“The Emperor didn’t tell me that the Slayer would be my son,” he says. He seems to be talking half to them, half to himself; Leia longs to interrupt, but her head hurts even more now, and she’s not sure she’s capable of stringing a coherent sentence together yet. “Perhaps it is not the Slayer that I need, but the family connection.”

That sparks something in Leia: she surges as upright as she can, yells, “ _Take me instead!_ ”

Han shouts something but she can’t make out what it is; Luke just stares at her and whispers, “ _Leia_.”

“The world needs the Slayer,” she points out. “It doesn’t… if one of us is going to die, it shouldn’t be you.”

She half-expects the Master to say something sarcastic, something cruel, like other enemies they’ve faced have done: when the cavern stops spinning long enough for her to look up at him, she finds he’s looking oddly conflicted. Perhaps she’d be moved, but the memory of her head slamming into the wall of its own accord is still fresh in her mind. 

“Let them go,” Luke is begging, sagging in his chains, eyes bluer than she’s ever seen them, “you don’t need them, _please_.”

“Take me,” Leia presses, ignoring him.

Han is swearing, a litany of fury that he’s trying to distract the Master with. The words are running together, and Leia swallows hard, the room wavering in front of her eyes.

The Master makes a magical gesture with one hand, and then he’s holding an ornate chalice. He takes a step closer to Luke again, and Leia cries out, wordless, primal, frantic. Luke stares up at him, eyes wide, and Leia sees the glamour shift again: when the Master reaches out a hand toward Luke’s, it’s a twisted, damaged thing, two fingers fused together, the skin brutally burned and scarred. With one long index fingernail, the Master slices Luke’s forearm open, wrist to elbow, holding out the chalice, and Leia screams.

-

They end up in a cliché of a prison cell, iron bars, stone floor, yet another underground cavern. Leia tried to fight the vampire who picked her up bodily and brought her here, but he was much stronger than she is and the concussion is starting to cause patches of darkness in her vision. Luke was unconscious before they were even unchained; he’s propped against the wall now, pale and woozy, bloody arm pressed to his chest. It took three vamps to get Han down here, and he was yelling and kicking the whole way. He’s considerably more battered-looking now, but he’s still in the best shape of the three of them.

The Master disappeared with his chalice once it was full; Leia doesn’t know if he’s experimenting on it or drinking it or what, but she hopes he chokes on it, anyway. For now, anyway, they’re in an odd sort of limbo.

“There’s no signal down here,” Han mourns, pulling his phone with its shattered screen out of his pocket. “I’m gonna complain to my network, who doesn’t cover secret vampire cave systems?” He taps at the screen. “I think I got some of a text out before we were jumped, so, maybe the cavalry will come for us after all.”

“Is the cavalry Lando?” Leia asks. It comes out kind of bitchy, but she forgives herself; if there’s a moment to be bitchy, it’s probably now.

“At least he’ll be dressed for it,” Luke says groggily.

They sit in a long silence after that; everything Leia can think of to break it will only make things worse. Still, if they’re going to die down here, she’d like to clear her conscience a little.

“I should have told you,” she says at last.

“You should have,” Luke confirms. 

“I hoped I was wrong,” she adds.

“You should still have said something,” Luke tells her, and she nods.

“It didn’t occur to me that he might need you for familial reasons,” she offers.

“Well,” Luke snaps, “next time _you_ can get your fucking arm cut open.” He takes a breath, then says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“You meant it a little,” Leia says.

“A little,” he agrees. “But I won’t later. I forgive you.”

“You don’t have to,” Leia says.

“I know,” Luke replies, and reaches out his good hand until she can interlink their fingers, squeeze tight. He raises their joined hands and presses a clumsy kiss to the back of hers. “We’re okay, Leia.”

Leia thinks she might be about to burst into tears, but she refuses to crack until she has to; darkness is starting to tunnel her vision, and it’s getting harder to thread her thoughts together. “We should do some first aid,” she concludes, reluctantly letting go of Luke, and reaching for his injured arm. His white t-shirt is soaked with blood, and while his Slayer healing powers normally start taking care of things earlier than they would with a normal person, the gash hasn’t even stopped bleeding, let alone anything else.

“This is the point where you take your shirt off so I can try to tourniquet and bandage his arm,” Leia says, turning carefully to Han.

Han plucks at his shirt and looks reluctant, a _what, this shirt that is the only shirt that I am wearing?_ expression spreading over his bruised face. “I don’t think so,” he says.

“We don’t have anything else,” Leia points out impatiently.

“Do you know the last time this shirt was washed?” Han asks.

“No,” Leia says.

“Neither do I,” Han replies. “So unless you want the kid getting gangrene…”

Leia huffs, and is annoyed that she is attracted to him. “Fine,” she says, “it’ll have to be mine then. Don’t make this weird.”

She peels her shirt over her head, and gets busy ripping at the sleeves. She has blood stained on her bra and she tries not to think about where that might have come from. When she glances up briefly, she finds Han is watching her, expression surprisingly complicated.

“I’m not making it weird,” he protests quickly. “Your murder dad is somewhere in these caverns and I bet he takes the shovel talk literally.”

“My actual dad does too,” Leia warns him, before passing Han one of her torn sleeves. “I need you to tie this above the wound.”

Between the two of them they manage to get Luke’s arm sort-of adequately dressed; Leia lays him carefully down so his arm is above his heart, and pokes him every time his eyelids start flickering. “We both have to stay awake, Luke,” she says thickly. 

What she really wants is to lie down and sleep until somebody else magically fixes all this, but she knows the only thing she can really do to protect herself from her undiagnosed head injury is to keep her eyes open and carry on going. If she’s lucky, she can rest later on.

Luke’s gaze is becoming increasingly unfocused, and he’s getting sweaty and pale and shivery. Still, he manages to say, “You’ve got me.”

“I’ve got you,” Leia agrees, trying to keep her gaze on his face and not on where his blood is soaking through the makeshift bandages. “I’ve got you.”

-

Time means nothing down here in the half-dark, and Leia keeps losing minutes at a time, drifting away and then coming back to Han shaking her, panic in his voice as he demands she pay attention to him. Luke is unconscious; Leia gets Han to check his pulse periodically, but there’s nothing more they can do for him at the moment. She’d think that the helplessness was making her nauseous, but that’s probably the concussion more than anything else. Her thoughts have taken on weight and are getting increasingly difficult to parse: they could have been here minutes or hours or days and she wouldn’t know.

“Come here,” Han says softly, and she’s tired enough to fall into his side without fighting it. He shifts until she can rest her painful head on his shoulder, his arm warm and secure around her. Under other circumstances she might even like it, or at least be irritated with herself for liking it. 

“Bet you weren’t bargaining on this,” she mumbles eventually.

Han laughs; she doesn’t hear it, but feels the way it rumbles in his chest.

“I never bargain on anything with you guys,” he replies. “You two have really done a number on me.”

“That’s our specialty,” Leia says slowly, and she thinks she might be shivering or maybe she’s not, everything’s a soft syrupy blur.

“Hey,” Han interrupts, sharp, “no woman has ever fallen asleep on me, princess, don’t think I’m about to let you be the first.”

Leia swallows. “I hate it when you call me that.”

“That’s the plan,” Han agrees, grimly cheerful. “Finally, my talent for pushing buttons gets a chance to shine.”

“I’ll have to punch you if we make it out of this,” Leia tells him.

“Sweetheart,” Han says, “you stay alive for me, I’ll let you do it twice.”

Leia laughs a little, and it hurts. “And Lando says you have no idea what girls want.”

She _thinks_ Han presses a kiss into her hair, but she’s not sure. “You’re not ‘girls’, Leia. A lot of the time, that’s the whole problem.”

It’s not a compliment, and it is. Leia manages a smile either way.

The cavalry does come for them in the end, as Han is telling Leia a story that she can’t follow except for the rise and fall of his voice. He’s holding onto her a little too tightly at this point, but she understands. Her own fingers, still entwined with Luke’s, are going numb from how hard she’s clinging. Some kind of door – do caverns have doors? – crashes open and a handful of vampires tumble through. They both jump, but to Han’s credit, he carefully props Leia up against the wall before pushing himself up and limping to the bars of their cell, yelling something angry and incoherent.

And then the vampire at the back of the group groans, and Leia blinks to clear her vision, because for a second all she can see is a splash of white fire and then nothing – not even dust. As the light dies down Leia squints and finally realises what she’s seeing. Qi’ra, holding an enormous sword made entirely of pure flame, is standing at the entrance to their cavern. Even in this time of frantic need she has a chicly practical high ponytail, a perfectly fitted leather jacket, and a matte red lip that Leia can admire even from over here. 

“Oh my god,” Leia breathes, because she has never been more attracted to anyone, never wanted to _be_ someone so much.

Qi’ra spots them in their cell, Luke and Leia on the floor and Han pressed against the bars, and grins brilliantly before bringing up her sword for another swing. The minute the blade touches the nearest vampire, he bursts into a pillar of brilliant flame and vanishes a second later. Whatever that sword is truly made of, wherever Qi’ra got it, Leia can taste the dark backwash of magic as it floods the whole space.

As Qi’ra cuts her way through the remaining vamps, Lando appears, carrying some kind of glowing orb in his hands; Leia recognises it as a tracking spell, and sure enough, the moment Lando sees them, the light flickers and fades to nothing. Dodging around Qi’ra, he hurries over to them, boots echoing loudly on the stone floor. Luke was right: Lando is dressed in royal blue and gold, all swirling cape and glitter. He stops at the bars, offering Han a smile.

“Having fun in there?” he asks.

“This isn’t even the tenth stupidest situation you’ve found me in,” Han replies, “but the kids need a hospital.”

Lando looks past Han and seems to register Leia and Luke for the first time. “Fuck,” he says succinctly, hands already reaching for the ties of his opera cape. “Are you gonna bleed on this?” he asks Leia.

She considers it. “Probably.”

He sighs, but undoes the cape anyway and passes it to Han, who makes his way over to gently wrap it around Leia’s bare shoulders in a way that’s very nearly tender.

“We need Chewie!” Lando yells across the cavern, loud enough to make Leia flinch and Luke’s eyelids twitch.

Qi’ra dispatches the last vampire and turns to shout, “Chewbacca!” over her shoulder.

Leia hears the growling long before Chewie himself appears. They’re not near the full moon, so he’s still in human form, but that doesn’t seem to have held him back at all. His beard is matted with blood, and he’s waving a severed arm that turns to dust in his grip as he bounds across the cavern toward them.

“Fucking _love_ that guy,” Han shouts, backing away from the bars.

Whether the bars are enchanted or just solid metal, they’re no match for a seven-foot angry werewolf. Chewbacca rips the door open, one hinge giving way entirely, and stumbles inside to roughly hug Han.

“You’re a miracle,” Han tells him, and, “You need to get Luke out of here.”

Leia has to pry her fingers from her brother’s, she’s been holding on so long, but sweet relief fills her as Chewie easily picks Luke up and carries him out, heading back the way he came. Lando comes in next, crouching down next to Leia.

“Can you stand?” he asks.

“I doubt it,” she replies, trying to smile and feeling her mouth trembling. Adrenaline and pain and delight are making it hard to focus, hard to hold herself together.

“Alright,” Lando says, and _does_ smile. “I’ll get you out, princess, don’t worry.”

“Don’t you start,” Leia tells him.

Qi’ra walks into their cage, plants her sword blade-first in the ground, and grabs Han by the shirt. He looks simultaneously terrified and turned-on as Qi’ra drags him into a kiss. A really, really good kiss, the kind that looks wildly cinematic and oddly like being smacked in the face. Leia has never been kissed like that, and, watching the two of them, isn’t sure whether she ever wants to be.

As abruptly as she grabbed him, Qi’ra lets Han go, then reaches for him again as he staggers and nearly falls. “We’re even,” she tells him a little breathlessly, “okay?” He nods, looking poleaxed. “I need you to say it,” Qi’ra presses.

“We’re even,” Han says.

“Good.” Qi’ra wraps her bare hand around the burning hilt of her sword – pulling the blade straight out of solid rock, Leia belatedly notes – and turns to Lando. “I’ll make sure you have a clear path out.” She winks at Leia, and then half-pulls, half-supports Han out of cell and back toward the door.

“What did they _do_ to each other?” Leia asks.

“You really had to be there,” Lando replies, sounding distracted, but a moment later he hefts her up into his arms.

“I wasn’t,” Leia says quietly, inaudible almost to herself, as Lando makes his way after Qi’ra and Han. 

“You’re here now,” Lando tells her, and Leia lets her head fall against his shoulder. His shirt is silky-soft and she suspects her hair is fairly grimy, but he doesn’t comment on it. Well, almost. “You’re not gonna puke on me, are you?” he asks suspiciously.

“I promise nothing,” Leia says, as they pass out of their cavern and into another one, strewn with scorched rock and dust and blood. She hopes someone has had the presence of mind to call an ambulance, because her eyes finally slip closed, and she doesn’t even try to open them again.

-

When Leia finally wakes up, she’s in a hospital bed, and her dad is sitting in a chair beside her. Her _real_ dad, the one she has had all of her life, who read her bedtime stories and held her when she cried and stuck every last A grade she ever received on the refrigerator with smiley face magnets. He looks tired, and there’s strain around his eyes that she only ever sees when her mom is back in hospital again. 

“Dad,” she croaks, voice cracking, and he leaps to grab her a glass of water and a straw.

“There’s my girl,” he says softly, as she gratefully drinks. Her throat is sore and dry, and everything feels fuzzy and soft at the edges.

“Luke,” she says, when she can.

“He’s okay,” her dad replies, putting the cup to one side and sitting down again, taking her hands gently in his. She has the needles of a drip in the back of one, and he’s careful not to jostle it. “They gave him a blood transfusion and he’s recovering fast enough to unsettle all the doctors. And Han was discharged hours ago, although he refused to leave even when they threatened him with security. Chewbacca and Lando are trying to keep him in the waiting area but he’s had about six coffees, so I’m sure he’ll bounce back along here in a minute.”

Leia tries to laugh, and it comes out as something like a sob.

“I’m sorry, daddy,” she manages, and then she’s finally crying.

“Oh, Leia,” he sighs, and shifts to sit on the edge of her bed and hold her. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

Maybe one day Leia herself will believe that. Her dad kisses her on the forehead, and gently sits back. “You’re concussed and probably won’t feel great for a few days, but an x-ray didn’t show any worse damage, so I’ll get the doctor to check you over and then I can take you home.”

The thought of home is a relief, and then her stomach clenches. “How is mom?” she asks.

Her dad strokes her hair and stands up. “We’ve both been very worried,” he replies. “But we knew what a smart strong woman we raised, and we trusted in you.”

“Stop it, you’ll make me cry again,” Leia warns, though her heart is hurting in the best possible way.

“Alright, I’m going.” Her dad holds his hands up, and smiles. She manages to smile back.

A doctor comes and checks a bunch of machine readings, shines a light repeatedly into her eyes, and asks her a variety of simple questions. Despite her headache she apparently passes all the tests, because the doctor agrees to discharge Leia on the understanding she’ll need forty-eight hours of observation. Her dad helps her with some mercifully clean clothes that he brought her from home and then goes out to sign a bunch of paperwork and sort out a prescription for whatever painkillers Leia will need.

She’s sitting on the edge of her bed, feeling just a little swimming and lost, when the door opens again.

“I hear you’ve been making a nuisance of yourself,” she tells Han as he slides inside, looking a little sheepish.

“It’s what I excel at,” he agrees.

He’s still dressed in his grimy and bloody jeans and shirt, now with the addition of a selection of gauzes and bandages. The bruising on his jaw and chin has really bloomed beautifully, a dark, blushing purple that makes Leia wince just to look at it. Not that she thinks she can be looking much better.

“I’m glad we’re alive,” she offers, because there are a lot of other things she could say, and all of them stick to her tongue. 

“Always how I prefer to end my nights out,” Han agrees.

He sits down beside her on the bed, a careful distance between them. Leia wants to reach for him, to reassure herself that he’s still in one piece, to thank him for doing his best to protect her when they were held captive, but she can’t. The silence between them stretches.

“About Qi’ra–” Han begins.

“It’s fine,” Leia interrupts. “I mean, I’m seventeen, I have a crush on _everyone_ , I understand.”

Han blinks a couple of times and looks vaguely panicked. “Okay,” he says. “I mean, I was never seventeen, but, okay.”

This is ridiculously untrue, and not just because of the obvious: Leia and Amilyn once spent an afternoon digging through the school’s old yearbooks, and discovered that not only did Han manage to successfully graduate, but that he’s also a few years younger than he claims to be. 

They fall back into silence again. “Did you just come in here to explain about Qi’ra?” Leia asks.

“I didn’t really _have_ an explanation,” Han shrugs, “I was kind of just going to wing it about Qi’ra.”

“Of course you were,” Leia says, and can’t even be annoyed at how fond she sounds, a grin slowly spreading across her face.

Han huffs and tries to look surly. “You know damn well I came in here to kiss you,” he snaps.

Leia shrugs, and sure, she’s on a lot of drugs right now, but she thinks she could even burst into giggles if pushed. “But you didn’t.”

“I still might,” he grumbles, and then gives up on scowling as Leia continues to watch him, amused. “You’re exhausting,” he tells her.

“I know,” Leia agrees.

It’s not a great kiss: they’re in a hospital, and both of them are on various kinds of painkillers, and everywhere they touch hurts at least one of them. But they nearly died and they didn’t, and Leia’s a little bit wanted to kiss Han since he trailed after her and Luke into their high school library on the night they met, complaining about vampires, and turned out in decent lighting to be a lot more attractive than his attitude implied. 

They pull apart, eventually, at voices in the corridor and Leia smiles up at Han. “How much coffee have you _had_?”

“So much,” he replies softly, kissing the corner of her mouth. “So _so_ much.”

He reluctantly slides off the bed just before the door opens to admit her dad, who is looking vaguely amused underneath his tiredness, and Leia wonders if he’s been dawdling outside to give her and Han a little more time together.

“Mr Solo,” he says.

“Mr Organa sir,” Han replies, and Leia swallows a laugh.

“At least you managed not to salute,” she offers.

Her dad helps her into the wheelchair the hospital have insisted that she leave in; Han brushes his hand gently over her shoulder before he disappears back down the hall. 

It’s not until they’re in the car and her dad is driving her home that something occurs to Leia. “You’re coping very well with… whatever happened to us,” she says carefully.

He stops at a red light. “You mean, you being kidnapped by your biological father, who also happens to be a warlock _and_ a vampire?”

Leia processes this in silence. “You knew all along,” she says flatly, and wonders if this is how Luke felt. It’s been a long night, a long day, a long whatever, and she can’t take any more revelations. She doesn’t want to _know_ anything else.

“Not everything,” her father replies. “We’ll talk, but not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Leia agrees. 

Her mom holds her for a long time when they get home, soothing and familiar, and they keep noise and talking to a minimum as Leia manages to feed herself some soup before she takes some more painkillers and goes back to bed, wondering if any of this will feel clearer in the daylight.

She wakes, jumbled, an unintelligible amount of time later, when Luke pulls her covers up and nudges her over. Leia left her window closed and he didn’t tap for her so she doesn’t know how he got in, but decides not to worry about it. Instead, she can only smile as he curls up beside her, like he wasn’t dying in front of her mere hours ago.

“It’s good to see you,” she mumbles fuzzily, as he wraps an arm around her waist and presses his face into her neck. 

“Same to you,” he replies, and it’s nice to just lie there for a while in silence, alive and safe.

“…did Han kiss you too?” Luke asks eventually.

“He did,” Leia confirms.

“Huh,” Luke says.

“Yeah,” she agrees, and drifts back to sleep.

-

The first couple of days are just painkillers and her parents periodically asking her how many fingers they’re holding up and discovering bruises in places Leia didn’t even know _could_ bruise. 

She ignores her phone, cracked across the screen and out of battery; the people who need to know that she’s alive know that she is, and she can’t face any more information of any kind right now, good or bad. She’s _so tired_ , so much more tired than she can ever remember being, and even when her dad firmly switches out the prescribed painkillers for regular Tylenol Leia still feels sluggish, listless. It’s possible that this is shock, maybe, or depression, or mourning for a situation that’s long gone, for people she never knew. Whatever it is, it’s worse than the headache, the lingering pain in her shoulders and arms from being chained up for so long, the scrapes and bruises she almost forgets about until she rolls over in bed and they sting again.

To their credit, her mom and dad don’t pressure her to pull herself together. Sometimes their landline rings and she can hear one of them talking in deliberately hushed tones, but neither of them ask her to come to the phone or pass on any messages. They don’t try to talk to her about it either, which is good, because she doesn’t have anything at all to say.

In the end, her mom comes to her room, opens the windows, and hands Leia a neat little stack of towels.

“Go shower,” she instructs in a tone which brooks no argument. Leia considers protesting, or at the very least whining, but her mom gives her the look she’s been receiving her entire life whenever she tried pushing her luck and instead she obediently takes the towels and shuffles down the hall to the bathroom.

Leia turns up the shower as hot as it will go, hot enough to hurt, but it feels kind of good to scrub herself down, work the shampoo through her hair with her fingers hard against her tender scalp. For a while she thinks she’s going to cry, but by the time she’s rinsing out the conditioner, something in her chest is calmer, and even the water falling on her variety of grazes doesn’t sting as much. When she gets back to her room, clad in fresh pyjamas, she finds her mom waiting for her.

Without saying anything, Leia sits down between her feet, like she did when she was a little girl, and her mom silently starts brushing her hair. It’s been a long time since they did this, since Leia was small enough to sit still or an approximation of it while her mom braided her hair, pinning up pigtails and adding ribbons and barrettes to match any of her outfits. It’s nice to sit here quietly, while her mom portions her wet hair into sections, gentle and methodical as ever.

“I always wanted a little girl,” her mom begins quietly, speaking into the rhythm of her steady braiding. “But the doctors told me that I couldn’t have a baby, that if I got pregnant, it would probably kill me.”

Leia knows this story; her parents told it to her a lot when she was young, when they wanted to reassure her that just because she was adopted it didn’t mean she wasn’t loved like a biological child. It hurts a little right now, the way everything hurts, but the familiarity is soothing enough that she doesn’t interrupt.

“It’s difficult to be in politics of any kind without finding out about the supernatural,” her mom continues. This is not what comes next in the story; the next bit is about how her parents wished _so much_ for her, and how lucky they felt when they finally brought her home. She doesn’t interrupt. “Even on a local level, it’s impossible to ignore the vampire attacks, or how many of your constituents don’t technically count as _human_. Your father was working for Mayor Valorum when he first became aware that what the papers were calling ‘drug-related killings’ were actually the work of a cabal of vampires. That’s how he met Obi-Wan.”

Leia starts to turn around, but her mother carefully but firmly turns her head back to face forward, starts plaiting another section.

“He always looked in need of about three decent meals and someone to knit him a sweater,” her mom says, sounding nostalgic, maybe fond. “I know you can’t imagine that, but we were all a lot younger then. I don’t know if your dad ever met your parents; I didn’t.”

Something that might be nausea and might not be rises in Leia’s throat. “So you both knew–”

“Obi-Wan came to us after you were born,” her mom interrupts, in a tone doesn’t allow space for Leia to keep talking. “We were told that Padmé and Anakin had been killed by a warlock, that Obi-Wan thought it would be best if you were brought up safe and far away from that kind of life. It wasn’t exactly the way we’d planned on adopting a baby, but I loved you from the moment you were first put into my arms.” Leia doesn’t have to turn to hear her mother’s smile. “That part of the story has always been completely true.”

Leia smiles too, blinks damp eyes. Still: “And what about Luke?”

Her mom neatly ties the end of the final braid, allows Leia to turn so she can look her in the eye. “We didn’t know about Luke. I swear to you.”

“But you know now,” Leia says.

“Obi-Wan came to talk to us when we first moved here,” her mom nods. “He told us that Luke was your brother, and the Slayer, and that you knew both of these things and we could act accordingly.”

Leia considers this. “You didn’t let on.”

Her mom’s smile is a little devious. “You were enjoying the sneaking so much,” she points out. “If you’d been noisy and obvious about breaking your curfew we might have mentioned it.”

It takes Leia a moment, but she manages to smile back.

“Here.” Her mom reaches over and hands Leia her charged phone. Leia looks at all the missed calls and unread text messages and instantly feels a little queasy and overwhelmed. “You’ll have a voicemail from Obi-Wan,” her mom adds. “I suggest you listen to that one first.” She brushes a hand over Leia’s neatly plaited hair and walks out, closing the door behind her.

Leia stays sitting on the floor, unlocks her cracked phone screen. Notifications blare red and demanding at her, but she goes straight to her missed calls and checks her voicemails. She’s got them from pretty much everyone she knows – Han excepted, of course – but while there are multiple messages from Amilyn and Lando and Luke, there’s only one from Obi-Wan, recorded at four a.m. two nights ago.

She hovers her thumb over the delete button, but presses play instead.

“Leia.” Obi-Wan’s voice is quiet, steady, but he sounds tired. “I know that there is nothing I can say that you will want to listen to right now, although I will congratulate you on the speed with which you cracked Qui-Gon’s code: it took me six months to work it out, and I didn’t like a lot of what I read when I finally did.” He sighs, and Leia waits; he’s quiet for so long that for a moment she thinks that the message has ended, but it hasn’t. “One day,” Obi-Wan says at last, “you will find yourself in an impossible situation, one where there is no good solution and no right course of action. I hope then that you will do better than I did, but that you might understand me a little better when you do.”

A beep from her phone tells her that that’s the message in its entirety. It’s not an apology, but that’s probably for the best: how do you apologise for a lie of omission that large? But then, how do you tell a truth that awful? 

Leia doesn’t call him back, doesn’t send a text message. But she doesn’t delete the voicemail either.

-

Amilyn shows up the following afternoon wearing a turtleneck sweater that’s way too bulky for the weather and with a stack of missed schoolwork in her arms. She drops it onto Leia’s bed and pulls Leia into a tight embrace that Leia returns immediately, clinging tightly to her friend. 

“I missed you,” Amilyn says simply when they finally draw apart.

“I missed you too,” Leia replies. She nods to the bulky uncharacteristic sweater. “New fashion choice?”

“Camouflage,” Amilyn replies, sounding annoyed, and tugs it off.

Leia can’t help the gasp of surprise she lets out. Amilyn is wearing a t-shirt underneath, and her arms, neck, and what she can see of her chest are covered in black inked symbols and strings of Latin.

“What happened?” she asks, finally noting that the markings taper off toward Amilyn’s hands, but her fingers are inkstained.

“Protection spell,” Amilyn replies, shifting the stack of school papers over she can drop onto Leia’s bed. Leia moves them to her desk, and sits beside her. “The minute Obi-Wan found out who had you, he had me come join him for a major casting session to make sure Darth Vader couldn’t kill any of you. It involved all kinds of stuff, I hadn’t even tried most of it before.”

“Shouldn’t it have washed off by now?” Leia asks, looking at a string of what she thinks might be actual ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics running down Amilyn’s forearm. “What did you _use_?”

“We had to enchant the ink,” Amilyn explains. “Obi-Wan says it’ll wear off in time, hopefully before my parents start asking awkward questions about all the hoodies I’m wearing in summer.”

“Wow,” Leia says, and, “Thank you,” and, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Amilyn replies, shifting so she can nudge Leia’s shoulder. “Like I wouldn’t do whatever it took to keep you guys safe. And also the world safe, apparently that was a whole subplot.”

Leia’s been avoiding thinking too much about the wider meaning of what happened with her father in the caverns, about what was supposed to happen or could have happened or, well, what might _still_ happen. 

“‘The world’?” she echoes.

“Apparently.” Amilyn waves her inky hands vaguely. “Enormously powerful warlock, Slayer power, familial power, it’s strong stuff. The protection spell was fucking _explosive_.”

Leia eyes her worriedly. “You’re okay though, right?”

“Sure.” Amilyn grimaces. “Well, I’m all burned out, Obi-Wan says I’m not to use magic for a while or I’ll either die or tip over into some kind of non-specific evil, but my wiccan group are all very impressed, no one else has done a spell that big.”

“Back up to the part where you could die,” Leia orders.

“I won’t die,” Amilyn says quickly. “I was channelling more magic than my body is used to, so I need to let it cool off a bit so I don’t overload myself, that’s all. And I will!” She points at her bright lavender hair. “I did this myself last night with all the peroxide and sitting around and ruined towels, it was very normal and oldschool.”

She sounds perfectly fine so Leia lets it drop, even though she doesn’t particularly want to. Too many people she cares about have been endangered lately.

“I bring other news!” Amilyn adds. “Luke said you were taking a time out – which is fine, by the way, I think I would too after last week.”

There’s a lot of things Leia could say to that and in the end she doesn’t say any of them, just nods a little and says, “News?”

“Qi’ra skipped town,” Amilyn says. “And like two days later they found the guy she was dating… Dryden… Something, I think? I don’t know, anyway, he was in his apartment with all these summoning circles on the floor and creepy demonic woodcuts on the walls and ceremonial swords and other evil magical shit. He was her link to whoever her demon friend is, he had the summoning symbol tattoo… somewhere.”

“‘Somewhere’?” Leia queries.

“Well.” Amilyn waves a hand. “We’re not sure which bit of him it was. When the police found him he was in…”

“Pieces?” Leia suggests.

“ _Chunks_ ,” Amilyn corrects, and shudders. 

“Do we think Qi’ra’s okay?” Leia asks. She’s pretty sure she owes her her life, or something very close to it.

“Obi-Wan says he thinks that she’s caught in a terrible bargain, but she’s still reaping the benefits at the moment so she’s probably fine.”

Leia considers this. “She did come to our rescue carrying an enormous fuck-off sword made entirely of fire.”

“I ¬ _heard_ about that,” Amilyn sighs, sounding a little covetous. Leia can’t blame her. “You know Qi’ra was the one who found out who’d taken you? She went straight to Obi-Wan to help plan your rescue.”

“I didn’t know that,” Leia admits.

“I assume that’s why she ran for it,” Amilyn says. “Avoiding repercussions.”

Leia swallows, twice, and forces herself to ask the question she’s been trying to avoid for _days_. Amilyn probably isn’t the person she should be asking, but she can’t bring herself to pick up the phone yet. “Do we think the Master’s still out there?”

Amilyn makes a face. “The spell we did weakened him a bunch – I _felt_ it weaken him, that was crazy – and then Qi’ra stabbed him with her demon fire sword, so I think he’s lying low, but… yeah. We’ve got nothing to confirm that he’s dead. I mean, seventeen years ago, Obi-Wan stabbed the fuck out of him and then set what he thought was his dead body on fire, and he’s still kicking around now.”

That would explain a lot about what Leia could see in flashes behind Darth Vader’s glamour, but she doesn’t bring it up: Amilyn doesn’t need to hear it. 

“I guess we’ll be better prepared next time,” she says, flat, but she doesn’t feel as despairing as she would have expected.

“Hopefully ‘next time’ will be a while away,” Amilyn says, “we’ve got the school dance next week and I don’t want that overrun with vampires.”

“You’re going to that?” Leia asks, surprised.

“You know I like any excuse to put on a fancy dress,” Amilyn reminds her. “I’m going with my lab partner.”

Leia frowns. “Isn’t he…well…”

“Yeah,” Amilyn says, “but there’s no girls I want to date at this school, and Wedge is a nice guy. I don’t think he’s any more interested in me than I am in him, but he’s already promised me a corsage to match my shoes, so what else do I need?”

Leia considers the handful of things she knows about Wedge Antilles, which isn’t much. “He’s got good eyebrows,” she remarks, and then, “I think hanging out with Lando has broken my brain.”

Amilyn laughs. “There are worse reasons to go to a dance with someone.” She tilts her head at Leia. “You’ll come, right?”

“And take who?” Leia asks. “I bet Lando owns about sixteen tuxes, but he wouldn’t be seen dead at a high school dance.”

“Take Luke,” Amilyn shrugs, like she’s thought about this and it’s the obvious solution.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to take my twin brother as my date,” Leia replies. “At best it’s depressing, and at worst it’s creepy.”

“It’s a bit weird,” Amilyn agrees, “but the only person there who’ll know it’s weird is me, and I’m already used to how weird you two are.”

“I’ll think about it,” Leia says, like she’s not already half-decided.

-

Lando comes over to Leia’s an hour before the dance, casually dressed to kill in a silver suit that Amilyn and Leia immediately covet, charms Leia’s mom with his usual ease, and unpacks a make-up kit that would put most professionals to shame.

“You can still come,” Amilyn offers distractedly, already rummaging through the wide array of glittery powders in the case.

Lando smacks her hands away. “I’ll be doing something considerably less wholesome with my night, but thanks, babe.”

Leia laughs. “I’m not sure spiked punch and a high school built over a hellmouth counts as that wholesome.”

“You can have opinions on ‘wholesome’ when you’ve played poker against several demons, run out of chips and had to bet your internal organs, and then bluffed on two pair,” Lando snips, holding two bottles of liquid eyeliner that look identical to Leia up to her cheek and frowning thoughtfully.

“You ever think you should get new hobbies?” Amilyn asks.

“Sometimes,” Lando says, “but then I look at Han and remember that I don’t have any of _his_ hobbies, so, it could be worse.”

Leia hasn’t seen or spoken to Han since they kissed in the hospital. This isn’t unusual, exactly, Han just kind of lurches in and out of her life, and it’s not like she’s reached out either. Han will never pick up if you call, and his text messages are just the wrong side of terse – as opposed to Lando’s, which tend to be composed solely of emojis, but can go on for multiple screens. She isn’t sure what she wants to say to him about that night, or that kiss, or her brother for that matter. She’ll get there, but not right now, anyway.

Amilyn is wearing midnight blue tonight, and Leia sits and watches as Lando gets to work with silver glitter eyeliner, three shades of silver-white eyeshadow, and a pair of false eyelashes with the tiniest holographic star sequins caught in them. While Leia would never wear any of this, she can appreciate how perfect it all is for Amilyn, who has bound up her still-purple hair with a silver tiara and painted her nails to match. Leia would wonder if Wedge is prepared for this, but frankly Amilyn often shows up to class dressed similarly, so it’s going to be fine.

“I’m not wearing false eyelashes,” Leia warns Lando when it’s her turn. Her dress is white, which she worried might look a bit wedding-y, but Amilyn and Lando have both assured her that she looks great, and she trusts them. This isn’t her first school dance, of course, but it’s her first in Coruscant; her first since her entire world shifted around her.

“I wasn’t even going to try,” Lando replies, pressing an offended hand to his heart. “Now hold still and don’t bitch or your wings will come out uneven.”

Leia obediently sits quietly while Lando hums to himself and uses a weird number of similarly-coloured beauty products for a make-up look he assured Leia would be ‘simple’, and watches Amilyn live-texting the process to what appears to be half the people in her contacts list. They had to improvise a silvery wrap for her, because while the worst of the magical ink has washed off, there are still a number of shadowy words and images scattered across her body. Hopefully the dance itself will be too low-lit for them to show much, but they thought they’d better play safe.

“There,” Lando says, handing Leia a mirror. “You can start praising me now.”

Before Lando arrived, Leia’s mom helped her braid her hair into a simple crown that wraps around her whole head. She’d wondered if it might be too plain, but Lando has made her whole face seem to glow – the make-up is natural enough, pale pinks and a soft red for her mouth, but whatever else he’s used has made her eyes enormous, her cheeks flush gently with health. It’s perfect, and she admits as much.

“Of course it’s perfect,” Lando scoffs, but his smile is warm and real.

Luke and Wedge arrive together, because it turns out they have a couple of classes together and get on well, and also Wedge has an actual car, which is more than the rest of them do. Wedge presents a corsage of midnight blue roses with a cheerful flourish that makes Amilyn laugh, grabbing a star-speckled clutch bag and following him outside. If he minds that she’s taller than him, even in her flats, he doesn’t mention it, looping an arm through hers. 

“You look lovely,” Luke tells her, genuine, and gives her a corsage of her own: white orchids on a little silver band she can slip onto her wrist. “That’s okay to say, right?”

“We’re weird, Luke, we might as well lean into it,” Leia replies on a smile. “You don’t look bad yourself.”

For a second or two, standing there in her hall, Luke in his smart black tux and Leia in her white gown, she thinks about a creased old photograph Obi-Wan dug out for them and passed over without comment: Padmé Amidala, the dark eyeliner and bright red lip paint Leia had learned was her signature look from a scant handful of other pictures, wearing a white dress with a rip in the left sleeve; Anakin Skywalker, hair sharply and unflatteringly short, unscarred and dressed in a badly-fitting suit. Qui-Gon Jinn, looking like the smart tired hippie Leia had pictured from his writing, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, exactly as her mom had described him. Anakin and Padmé were grinning for the camera, so brutally _young_ Leia almost couldn’t believe it. They’d had their whole lives ahead of them, she’d thought on first glance, and then seen the crucifix around Padmé’s neck, the knife at Anakin’s belt not-quite hidden by his jacket, and thought: _they knew that they didn’t_.

Leia blinks, and the feeling is gone again.

The dance is like every other school dance: noisy, and crowded, and overfull of balloons that don’t exactly hide that this is their gymnasium. They tried to persuade Obi-Wan to chaperone, although he’d responded with an irritated eyeroll and nothing more and presumably is spending tonight somewhere with less loud music and more tea and books. Leia’s still kind of working out if she can ever completely forgive him, but she looked at those old photographs he produced for them, really looked, and wondered what it was like for him to lose his mentor and his best friends in a matter of days to the worst betrayal possible, and maybe she’s decided to cut him a little slack. They’re here now, after all, more or less in one piece.

Luke is an amusingly uncoordinated dancer, but he’s perfectly aware of this fact and doesn’t step on her feet, so Leia doesn’t mind dancing with him. She dances with Amilyn, their height difference never more apparent, and with Wedge, who has an easy grace that’s a relief, and with several of the boys from her classes and some of the girls too. It’s almost _too_ normal, too much like the high school experience she was sure she’d never have again when she first learned that vampires were real and her secret long-lost brother was the Chosen One. And definitely an experience she never thought she’d have less than a fortnight ago, when she was looking up at the creature wearing the face of Leia’s biological father and begging him to kill her so that her brother could survive.

She still shouts herself awake sometimes, heart pounding and breath caught in her chest, but it’s okay: Luke is often there too, already reaching out a hand to reassure her, to reassure himself. It’s not great, but they’re working on it.

Amilyn and Luke are swaying to a designated slow dance and cracking each other up, much to the annoyance of various actual couples around them, and Leia looks away, ducking her head to hide her own grin. When she looks up again, she spots an awkward figure hovering in the doorway, and her heart turns over. She takes her time to walk across the room, though, enjoying the way that Han’s searching eyes finally locate her, widen, and then stay fixed only on her as she walks closer.

“You look… suitably regal, princess,” Han says.

“Careful,” she warns, “that was nearly a compliment.”

“They’re crafty bastards,” Han agrees. “I’ll be on my guard.”

He’s wearing a tuxedo jacket that’s way too nice to be a thing he actually owns, although he’s paired it with jeans that are torn from stupid mistakes rather than fashion, battered boots, and an old shirt he should probably have thrown away months ago. 

“Has Lando realised you’ve stolen his jacket yet?” Leia asks, because there’s nowhere else Han could’ve gotten it.

He grins, rakish and sheepish in one. “No. I’m waiting on a bunch of angry emojis anytime soon, though.”

Leia shakes her head, can’t help laughing. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Hey,” he protests, “I came to your stupid prom and everything.”

“This isn’t prom,” Leia tells him. “And don’t pretend for one second that you’re going to actually set foot inside, or dance, because I have actually met you before.”

Han shrugs a shoulder. “Still came.”

Leia pins him with a look. “Are you here for me or for Luke?”

Han’s expression gets sort of complicated and Leia doesn’t even get annoyed with herself for finding it charming. “Why can’t you be the kind of siblings who don’t talk about stuff?”

“Because then we wouldn’t be the kind of siblings willing to entertain your nonsense,” Leia points out.

Han’s gaze slides off her face and Leia turns to find Amilyn and Luke have drifted over to them. 

“I like this grand gesture,” Amilyn tells Han. “I award it… five stars.”

“Out of five?” Han asks, with his favourite grin.

“Out of ten,” Amilyn replies, “I’m pretty sure that shirt has at least one bloodstain.”

“I’ll take it,” Han says, and casts an eye over the dancing crowd. “Where’s your date?”

“He’s catching up with his friend on the lacrosse team, and then we’re leaving and getting ice cream,” Amilyn replies easily.

A crease appears between Han’s eyebrows. “He? I thought…”

“Yeah,” Amilyn agrees, “but that’s what my teen witches summer camp is for.”

Leia already got a version of that story when Amilyn got back last September, but from the look on Luke and Han’s faces, they did _not_.

“I just thought you guys spent the time comparing crystals and writing in your feelings journals and braiding each other’s hair,” Han says.

“Sure,” Amilyn says, “but a lot of rituals have some really sapphic energy and a bunch of mandatory nudity.” She shrugs, like, _what can you do?_

“Huh,” Luke says, and blinks repeatedly. Amilyn bursts out laughing and Leia can’t help joining her.

“I’m going to find Wedge,” Amilyn says, still grinning. “Have fun, don’t do anything Han says is a good idea.”

She melts back into the crowd, or at least as well as a tall girl with lavender hair and a tiara _can_ melt into a crowd. Han turns back to Luke and Leia, looking a little panicked, but not _only_ panicked.

“Did you bring us a limo?” Luke asks, smirking.

“I brought the Falcon,” Han responds proudly.

“This is the most half-assed grand gesture in the world,” Leia comments.

“Of course it is, sweetheart, that’s how you know it’s _my_ grand gesture,” Han replies. “You coming, kids?”

“You should probably stop referring to us as ‘kids’ if you want to continue making out with us,” Luke remarks.

Han slings an affectionate arm around his shoulders. “We can discuss it.” He holds out a hand to Leia. “Ready for your second kind of fucked-up date of the night?”

She takes his hand and he links their fingers together, easy. “Unfortunately, yes,” Leia says, and lets him lead them out into the moonlight.

**Author's Note:**

> \- If you fancy more of teen Leia and teen Holdo being canon teen pals, the Leia YA novel by Claudia Gray is FULL of that good stuff, and _Most Wanted_ by Rae Carson has delightful teen Han and teen Qi'ra.
> 
> \- I basically wrote this listening to the original _Buffy_ compilation albums (the WIP title was _are you still being followed by the teenage fbi_ ), the 2019 Jonas Brothers album, and a lot of Florence & the Machine for the feelings bits, if you wish to make yourself a nonsensical playlist.
> 
> \- Since I'm tentatively writing this about people who were about for the Original Trilogy type time, yes, I have a lot of thoughts about what the Rogue One people are up to, and Mando & Cara & the baby, but I can't make any promises about continuing because my mental illness used to make me productive a few years back but doesn't now.


End file.
